Semioclast

Jeremy Boggs and Dave Lester of the Center for History and New Media have released their first two WordPress plugins over at their new site Scholarpress.net. Separately, each plugin offers something interesting for academics (especially educators) who use WordPress as their platform of choice. Dan Cohen gives us an overview at the Digital Humanities Blog:

ScholarPress’s inaugural plugins are Courseware and WPBook. Courseware (co-developed by New York Public Library’s Josh Greenberg), turns WordPress, normally a blogging platform, into a full-fledged course management system, including easy syllabus creation, assignments, bibliographies, and scheduling. (And yes, you can have a class blog too.) WPBook creates your very own Facebook application out of your WordPress blog, allowing it to be embedded in Facebook.

That’s when things start to get interesting. By using Courseware to create a blog/CMS system and then embedding that blog in a Facebook app with WPBook, you have effectively set yourself up to use Facebook (rather than that god-awful Blackboard) for course management. Despite it’s “simplicity” students still have trouble with Blackboard. So, would moving CMS over to where the students already are (Facebook) make things easier overall?

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