I also struggled with just how one would produce content on the iPad. There are a few apps, such as Brushes, that seem to make great use of the multi-touch, but that list is pretty short when you focus on apps that could be used for education. Katie Stansberry gives a list of a few that she considers to have educational potential. Most of them seem to be geared toward K-12 and not undergrad. Maybe the best way for colleges and universities to use the iPad in their curriculums is to have faculty and students develop apps for the iPad. I think it would be of even greater benefit if the apps they develop were geared toward K-12.

I know Apple is selling them like mad, but I just have to shake my head at institutions giving them to all the incoming first-years. Stanford Medical School is on that list so maybe my former colleague, Joe Benfield, can shed a little light on how Stanford Medical School is using them in the curriculum. I guess for the moment I’d just like to try an understand why these schools think the iPad is important to their curricula. Am I completely off-base?

The current design is using hooks to insert the date before the title, the edit link after the title, and the post footer after the post content. It also uses it to do the footer by disabling the standard Genesis footer in favor of my own. All in all it took me about 8-10 hours to get the site looking like it does now. The majority of that time was spent looking at the site through Developer Tools to target the exact elements to style them. Getting the specificity right for the CSS can be challenging, but not terrible. However, that time is considerably less than what it took to get the old theme written. I have to acknowledge though that I have gotten more proficient with CSS, PHP , and HTML and that I was able to copy some code from the old theme. I would still argue that you would see much faster times to completion on designs than if you are not using a framework at all.

There are still a few things to tweak like getting the edit post link to be on the same line as the title, preventing the post footer from displaying on pages and getting my Typekit fonts working again. I don’t see those taking very long and if I encounter any difficulties the support forums at StudioPress totally rocked it for me. There are other frameworks out there like Carrington and Hybrid (a couple that I have tried) and themes that allow for tons of modification through options (like WooThemes Canvas theme), but I would highly recommend Genesis and the Simple Hooks plugin if you are considering putting your design on top of a framework.

As I was describing it to my wife, she said she thought this would be great for one of her clients. Her client is in the recruiting business and collects information on up to six potential candidates for each position they are trying to fill. This information is currently typed up and then put together in a candidate book that is presented to the firm with which the recruiter is working. My wife wondered if it would be possible to do this using WordPress and Anthologize to automate the process and provide database storage of the candidates and digital output of the book. I told her I thought it could.

As I see it we need to create custom post types reflecting the information the recruiter collects and wishes to associate with each candidate. Once those custom post types are created the recruiter would prepare the candidate book using Anthologize. The bonus would be that the recruiter could run a multisite setup and create a new blog for each placement they were working on and give access just to the client who contracted with them to make the placement. Now the client can view the candidates online via a customized candidate site or via PDF, ePub, RTF, etc. With a rating plugin they could even allow other members of the hiring process to rate the candidates by rating their associated posts on the site. I think I’ll be working on this in my spare time, referencing Alan’s series about custom post types, and keeping notes on how it might relate back to eportfolios and other things I’m thinking about in relation to my day job.

The move will allow me to consolidate Orthogonal Creations and Jon Breitenbucher under this Network using the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin. It will also allow me to move WoW Ravings to it’s own blog and pull the Warcraft stuff off of Playing with Technology. That is what I’ll be working on for the next few days of my vacation. The cool thing is that this is all stuff that I should be able to use for some ideas I have for Voices.

The number of pipes available and the range of functionality is astounding. You can create pipes that allow for user input or pipes that operate on CSV and other data files available on the Web. The funny thing is I don’t hear about Pipes by the year and it worries me that such an awesome tool may just disappear one day. Maybe I just am not moving in the circles where Pipes are common place, or maybe people just take them for granted. But I think I’d like to get more faculty playing with Pipes and thinking about creative ways they could be used in education. What about digital storytelling with Pipes? Bryan? Alan?

Edit: Based on the related posts it looks like I rediscover Pipes about once a year. I find that amusing and sad.

This change should open up a world of plugins for MS installations that MU installs could not really count on. It also is a huge undertaking since we have been running 2.8.6 for the past year. I just want to document the steps I’m taking on the test server for upgrading from 2.8.6 to 3.0.

• Disable BP Events plugin (breaks when upgrading to 2.9.2 with white screen)
• Disable Incsub Support, Wibstats, RA BP Author Link, RA Featured Posts in mu-plugins (move to retired-mu-plugins)
• Switch themes to a generic theme
• Rename our modified BP Corporate theme to Wooster BP Corporate
• Enable Wooster BP Corporate theme for main site
• Activate Wooster BP Corporate theme
• Upgrade BP Corporate Theme (download from WPMU Dev Premium)
• Rename BP Corporate Child theme to BP Corporate Wooster Child
• Copy header.php from BP Corporate theme to the Wooster Child and add the modifications to allow rotating header images
• Upgrade from 2.8.6 to 2.9.2
• Disable Ahjira Recent Site-wide Posts (broken with newer BuddyPress versions)
• Upgrade any plugins that indicate they need it (BuddyPress and BP Groupblogs excluded)
• Disable BuddyPress and BP Groupblogs
• Upgrade BuddyPress
• Upgrade BP Groupblogs
• Switch the theme to BP Corporate Wooster Child (our old modified version of BP Corporate doesn’t work with new BuddyPress)
• Run the Upgrade script to update all the blogs (takes a long time, maybe 2 hours)
• Click the Update to 3.0 button in the Dashboard
• Click Upgrade Automatically
• Follow the instructions in the Dashboard header
• Click on Update Network (and wait 2 hours for it to finish)

After this lengthy process Voices should be upgraded to WordPress 3.0 with the latest BuddyPress. One item of note is that any changes that were supposed to be made to .htaccess need to be made to the wpmu-rewrite.conf file of the Apache2 install. Our SysAdmin does not use .htaccess and has those directives in this special Apache2 config file. This means an Apache restart will be required for images to work after the upgrade from 2.9.2 to 3.0.

So far I am very happy with the upgrade and am looking forward to playing with custom posts and the other features added. But the most pressing thing for me is taking the five sites I maintain and moving them to networks so that they can have sites of their own and so that I only have one code installation to worry about. For example, on this site, it would be nice to have another site warcraft.jon.breitenbucher.net that could have it’s own theme and plugins. Currently, I would have to muck about with custom code to style the WoW ravings page differently and while I know how; I just don’t feel like doing it. So I am looking into ways to move this site and four of the others to the wordpresscore.breitenbucher.net codebase since it is already set up as a MultiSite installation. I’m sure that @andrea_r and other WP folks can give me some pointers. If all goes well I hope to have this migration done in the next week or so. I think doing this will give me some good experience for what we will be able to do with Voices as well.

I came back to thinking about this again yesterday when I saw a post in my RSS feeds saying Apple had approved some app and that Jobs had said people who wanted to watch porn could get an Android phone. Do you find this alarming? As I thought about it I sure did. Basically I’m letting a third party tell me what I can and can’t do on my device. Then I wondered how that is any different than network television. I don’t think I’m completely off base with my concerns and I’m sure others have voiced similar concerns and so the question becomes what can I do about it? I’m sure the Android app store has some sort of approval process and policies governing what can be in the Market. Until you can add apps to the device without going through a store you are stuck.

This is why I’m not sure I’ll ever own an iPad. To me it is a giant media consumption device and I can consume media on my HDTV, laptop, and iPhone just fine. In fact the laptop even lets me create things for others to consume and that is the rub. Without a way to create meaningful content the iPad will always be useless to me. I think the only way this changes is if everything is in the cloud and the iPad just becomes a means to interface with it. But for now I can’t develop a WordPress template in the cloud (maybe someone will enlighten me). Maybe Chrome OS will be where we are in 5-7 years, but for today I am left pondering whether I agree with the closed universe Apple seems to be developing.

It was only a few months later I think that I heard about QuickSilver the perpetual beta quicklauncher. I don’t remember why I switched but I switched from Launchbar to Quicksilver. It was probably the nice bezel look I could get on Quicksilver that made me switch. I was still in heaven and able to fly around my computer without taking my hands off the keyboard. Maybe I wasn’t flying since I type so slowly, but it was faster then mousing around. Then a few months ago Boone Gorges wrote a post about how he was using Quicksilver and I realized I had been missing so much. I tried to follow some of Boone’s tips but encountered little success. To top it off Quicksilver started crashing and just generally acting sluggish since upgrading to 10.6.

So today I happened to read a tweet that mentioned a new quicklauncher, Alfred. The name is not as sexy as Quicksilver, but I downloaded it anyway. Initially it didn’t work. I wrote the nice folks at Alfred and they hooked me up with a version that would run on my old non 64 bit laptop (someone should really get me a new one). Let me say I love the design of their site and so far Alfred feels a lot faster than Quicksilver. I’m not sure Alfred can do all the crazy things Boone has Quicksilver doing, that is why I’m hoping he downloaded it and can try to push it. For now I’ll try Alfred and keep my hands on the keyboard. Yahooooo!

Tungle makes it super simple to allow people to schedule meetings with me. In the first four weeks of class, I’ve already had half of my class use the link I give them in our course site to setup a meeting. So far it has been a joy to use and I can’t think of anything I’d need to change. I’ve enjoyed it so much that I recommended it to the other members of the Instructional Technology department. And they must be doing something right because my boss has started using it. I’m not sure how you’d find it via Google as a search for “web based scheduling” and “web based appointments” didn’t turn up Tungle in the first page of results. Hopefully people reading this spread the word.