The session was well-attended and full of energy, and I think we touched on most if not all of the issues implicated in administering an online publishing platform at the College including pedagogy, resources, administration, and learning outcomes. BCTC was generous enough to record audio of the presentation and to post it to iTunes U, and it’s available below for your listening pleasure. For those of you who wonder what Blogs@Baruch is all about or just what it is I do around here, the audio below should answer some of your questions.

Teaching With Blogs

If you’d like to download this to your portable device for mobile edification, you can get the file here (if I link Cacophony will turn the link into an audio player): http://cac.ophony.org/audio/teachingwblogs.mp3.

For the second straight year, we’re awarding the Blogfessor of the Year Award to Zoe Sheehan Saldana, of Baruch’s Fine and Performing Arts Department. The award comes with priority support from the Schwartz Institute on all online publishing endeavors. Of course, Zoe already has that because she’s so awesome.

Zoe developed three sites on Blogs@Baruch this academic year.  Last Fall, she did a Do-it-Yourself Publishing site that used FeedWordPress to syndicate nineteen individual journals where students documented making their own books from scratch (some digital, some not).

This Spring, she used a site in her Basic Graphic Communication course… here’s a description of her course and how she used her course blog from her “About” page:

…this course

This course introduces the graphic design process and methodology. Conceptual and creative thinking is stressed and understood through problem-solving assignments based on research, readings, and classroom demonstrations. The student is introduced to graphic design principles and exposed to historical and contemporary models and current standards of advertising and design. The Macintosh computer is included as the primary graphic design environment. This class is a prerequisite for all advanced Graphic Communication courses. Complete course guide available here, as a PDF file.

…this blog

This blog is a venue for presenting, exploring, and discussing work, ideas, and topics pertaining to the course.

And, finally, together we developed a site for the Focus on Photography Exhibit which served initially as a processing space for members of the Baruch community to submit photos that they wished to be considered for a physical exhibit (which opened last week at the Mishkin Gallery).  The site’s since evolved into an online companion displaying close to 200 images submitted by Baruch students, faculty, and staff.  The submissions process used the TDO Mini Forms plugin to collect information from applicants, allow them to upload their images, and then it published those images to password protected pages where the exhibit judges could asses them. After decisions had been made about which images were accepted for the physical exhibit and which were not, Zoe hacked the Monotone WordPress theme (ideal for photo blogging) to create the online exhibit, which will live beyond the one at Miskhin. The amazing photographic ability of Baruch folks is a topic for another post, but I encourage you to take your time and click through the exhibit to see the fantastic images these folks have captured.

What’s so great about Zoe, beyond her gracious personality and charm, is that she’s exactly what an educational technologist like me needs to get better at what I do: someone who asks questions that I don’t know the answers to, patiently awaits the answer, and works to arrive at a consensus around what can be done with the tools, time, and resources available.  She’s a great collaborator and a creative teacher.  And, as she showed in talks she gave at last year’s CUNY WordCampEd and this year at the Baruch Teaching and Technology Conference, she has a strong grasp of the pedagogical, political, and philosophical impulse behind what we’re trying to do with educational technology at the Schwartz Institute.  As her course blogs and her own art show, she’s an O.E.: Original Edupunk, and both Baruch and the Schwartz Institute are lucky to have her around.

image credit: lumax art

This is where Blogs@Baruch enters the picture. I joined Luke in a training session to introduce WordPress to the 2010 peer mentors, each of whom will lead a section of Freshman Seminar come September. Before our session with the peer mentors, we discussed some of the high and low points of the 2009 blogging season in Freshman Seminar. It should be said at the outset that Blogs@Baruch’s support of Freshman Seminar was amazingly successful in 2009 especially in light of the limited time for planning. Blogs@Baruch supported 60 section blogs with 20 students a week for a total of 1200 freshman bloggers, each of whom were tasked with writing six blog posts over the course of the semester, one after each of the required workshops.

But feedback from the peer mentors indicated that buy-in was low among freshmen. Last year’s peer mentors expressed frustration at having to chase after freshmen and repeatedly remind them to complete their blogging assignments. They also told us that the blogging assignments themselves left something to be desired, and that their procedural nature (to report back on the workshop just attended) tended to put a damper on students’ enthusiasm for the task. And finally, the peer mentors expressed a desire to customize the look of the section blogs.

We took each of these critiques seriously and decided to rethink the approach of Blogs@Baruch to Freshman Seminar in light of the concerns raised by peer mentors.  Luke already had plays to open up the WordPress blogging environment, including giving more control to peer mentors over theme selection and plug-in activation, and incorporating social networking functionality through BuddyPress to create a more networked and collegial environment for peer mentors and first year students alike. Luke invited me to join the team that oversees Freshman Seminar to help him address the second critique, that is, to rethink the role of blogging in the Freshman Seminar curriculum. And so last Friday we collaboratively facilitated two sessions with peer mentors, part of which was a brainstorming session to develop more compelling blog post prompts.

photo credit: everdred

The blog post prompts that follow invite students to reflect on the processes of identity construction through various lenses. In different ways, these blog post prompts encourage students to integrate online, social, and multimedia tools into their student identities, and to consider how aspects of their personal history can inform and ultimately enrich their academic work. If they seem repetitive, that’s because they are. Students are actually not required to complete any of them — which is a whole different issue — but in any case, we are hoping to entice them to do some. The idea is to make the blog post prompts so interesting that students feel compelled to do them!

This is what we’ve come up with so far:

1. If you were an iPhone app, which one would be you and why?

2. Use Grooveshark to make a playlist, a soundtrack for your life, and write a blog post explaining the significance of each song.

3. Cheap eats: Write a restaurant review of a inexpensive lunch spot in the Baruch area or around where you live. Include a photograph of the food.

4. Audit your Facebook account, and write about it; OR Google yourself, and share what’s true and what’s not.

5. Pick a stereotype that you think you embody and expand upon, shatter, or embrace it.

6. Consumer identities: What are the five most important brands that you use throughout the day? Why do you think you are drawn to these brands.

7. Choose a cartoon character that is in some way like you, post a picture or a video of this character, and write a blog post explaining your reasoning.

8. Using Paint or a similar program, paint how you see yourself, and post it with an explanation.

9. Record everything you eat in a day and share it. Reflect on what this reveals about your culture and identity.

10. Take photos or record a video of your commute to school. Describe the various spaces you pass through during this process. For instance you might compare the experience of being on the street in your neighborhood, versus being on the bus or the train, versus at Baruch. What stands out to you?

11. Find images related to your heritage on Flickr, and write a blog post explaining their significance.

12. Write a post about your favorite genre of art, and share an example.

13. Take and share a photo of something at Baruch that doesn’t work OR of some ironically defaced signage in the city at large.

14. If you had $1m and had to give it to a charity, which  and why? OR Respond to an open ended, critical thinking philosophical/ethical question, like for example: Is it acceptable to lie under certain circumstances?

15. Search for your name or an idea about you on flickr, and post the first photo that comes up. Compare it to a photo that you think more resembles you.

I plan to revise this list of prompts based on the feedback of the ever-supportive edtech community at CUNY and beyond. Any suggestions? Help me make these prompts irresistible!

Performing Diasporas is centered around artists-in-residence — in 2010-2011, Maya Lilly; in 2011-2012, Randy Weston; and, both years, Mahayana Landowne — each of whom’s work engages questions of group and individual identity formation. These artists will perform throughout their residencies, and also lead and participate in workshops. Much of the programming, however, will be directed at incoming students. The first year experience for the next two years will revolve in large part around exploration of the project theme: the Freshman Text will be about diasporic identity, the artists-in-residence will perform at August’s Convocation, and significant components of Freshman Seminar and the curricula of selected Learning Communities will be devoted to the theme.

As part of the Steering Committee planning this project, I’m especially excited by a few particulars. Too often the administrative labor of higher education falls into silos whose work is narrowly focused and lacks programmatic coordination with other initiatives at the College. This project is structured to counter that impulse by drawing several partners into a collaborative effort to inject consideration of both the arts and the themes of identity and diaspora into the curriculum. Obviously, this will most directly impact our first year students. But it’s also good for everyone at the College for the various moving administrative parts to find synergies. The project will raise the profile of BPAC, inject the first year experience with a variety of new ideas, and dovetails nicely with Dean Jeff Peck’s Global Studies Initiative.

The project also will also help lead Blogs@Baruch into its next phase. Last Fall, we began supporting Freshman Seminar. 1200 first year students wrote more than 6500 blog posts to 60 weblogs, all of which were aggregated ultimately into a single space. FRO Blogging was a success, if solely because we were able to pull it off with little time to plan. Feedback from last Fall’s students and the Peer Mentors who led the seminars suggested the desire for more creative leeway and fewer required blog posts (students were expected to author at least six reflections on enrichment workshops they attended over the course of the term). The feedback also showed appreciation for the social component of the project; students used their blogging to get to know each other and to form community, something that’s always a challenge at a commuter campus like Baruch.

We’ve redesigned FRO Blogging to incorporate this feedback and to intersect with the goals of Performing Diasporas. There will be three specific components to FRO Blogging in Fall 2010:

• Students will be required to write blog posts at the beginning and end of the semester reflecting on their adjustment to college and, in the middle of the semester, will post monologues about their own backgrounds that they develop with their Peer Mentors (who will receive training). Selected monologues will be shaped and then performed by professional actors at an end-of-the-semester event: “Baruch’s Voices.” In Spring 2011, students who are interested in performing their own monologues will workshop them and then perform at a series of Coffee Houses.
• Each seminar will be asked to develop its blog over the course of the Fall semester. We will push this process along by crafting prompts that are distributed weekly and that encourage students to reflect upon and share their own stories. Peer Mentors will guide the process, with assistance, and students will be nudged, but not required. At the end of the semester, the most fully developed sites will be recognized with an award. This is an experiment in voluntary buy-in, and we realize that student investment of effort will be uneven. Yet, the constraints of a non-credit course make this approach necessary, and the goal is less to have students develop polished public spaces than to get their feet wet thinking critically about how to present artistic and intellectual material on the open web.
• Finally, I’m excited to note that we’ll be rolling out BuddyPress this Fall, which will add a social networking layer to Blogs@Baruch, and afford students additional opportunities to connect with and get to know one another.

Ultimately, what I like most about this project is that it treats our students as creators and makers of knowledge, not merely as consumers. Baruch students are among the most interesting students in the world, and yet few of them seem to realize this (in fact, that’s one of the things that makes them interesting). Performing Diasporas, because it will draw our students inside productive processes and creates multiple opportunities for them to see and share the art in their own lives, is going to be something special to watch.

A variety of constituencies at the College have begun using the system for a range of internal and external communication. We have some fantastic librarians at the Newman Library, and they’re using Blogs@Baruch for a Reference Blog, an Idea Lab, and a Graduate Research Blog. They’ve also begun using CommentPress to discuss a Library Planning document. The Institute shares many interests and goals with the College’s librarians, and we have so much to learn from them. I’m particularly interested in collaborating with them to explore the role of technology and self-publishing in cultivating digital literacies among our students. This semester’s conversations were a great start.

The Baruch College Honors Program has begun using Blogs@Baruch this semester for a number of projects. They’re now hosting their homepage on the site, taking advantage of WordPress’ elegant content management features, and offering the staff an easy way to stay in contact with students (current and prospective). Also, first year Baruch Scholars have been given their own blogs to cultivate over their careers here, and their posts aggregate here. This is envisioned as a kind-of low stakes eportfolio project: give the students the space, and encourage (but don’t require) them to explore it. Another interesting Honors publishing initiative is the Change For Kids blog, where students working as reading tutors in a number of New York City elementary schools are blogging about their experiences, taking advantage of the opportunity to collaboratively reflect on and work through the challenges of working with children. Kudos to the Baruch Honors Program!

Frank Fletcher, the Executive Director of the Graduate Programs at the Zicklin School of Business, has been spearheading the business school’s move towards self-publishing. Frank has been encouraging his colleagues in Zicklin to explore a variety of initiatives on Blogs@Baruch over the past six months, and is now publishing to Lexington 24:25, where he’ll highlights developments in the MBA program and “identify emerging needs and trends in management education.” We look forward to supporting Zicklin, particularly in their efforts to connect Baruch students with potential employers and alumni.

Three journals are now hosted on Blogs@Baruch. Lexington Universal Circuit: A Journal of Economics and Politics is edited and authored by Baruch undergrads, launched last month (see details here), and we look forward to seeing that project continue to evolve. Dollars & Sense, which used to publish the selected journalism of Baruch students once a year as a beautiful (but costly to produce) magazine, now publishes on a rolling basis, for free, using Blogs@Baruch. While I myself miss the bound hard copy version, and see this transition as a microcosm of the larger troubles facing journalism, I’m happy that the faculty members who oversee the project– Josh Mills and Andrea Gabor– see the opportunities that are made available by self-publishing. For instance, student work produced in the fall doesn’t need to wait until the spring for publication; a wider range of work can be featured; and it’s now easier to share the work of our students with a much broader audience. Finally, iMagazine, the journal of student writing overseen by the Baruch College Writing Center, is in the process of migrating to Blogs@Baruch; stay tuned for a launch early next calendar year at this url.

There are other ongoing initiatives: the journalism department is using Blogs@Baruch to plan a new The East 20s, a food news site being created by the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch, and to serve the multimedia reporting of its students. The Baruch College Teaching Blog remains active. And, well, we can even include Cac.ophony.org as a Blogs@Baruch initiative; our fellows have simply been killing it this semester.

These are just a few of the most exciting non course-based uses of Blogs@Baruch; there are others in the planning stages that promise to take advantage of the power of this publishing platform to create unique opportunities for members of the Baruch community to interact with each other and audiences beyond the campus. One is our plan to support selected student bloggers who’ll be tasked with chronicling their lives at the College for a broader audience. I’ve often said that we have the most interesting students in the world, but few of them know just how interesting they are. Blogs@Baruch, by providing multiple paths into the work our students and faculty are doing, makes the case more powerfully than I ever could.

WPMu continues to provide a flexible platform for our faculty members to structure and explore online communication and composition in their courses. Course blogs this semester have been used to aggregate individual student portfolios in a Do-It-Yourself Publishing course, for students to share and comment upon Shakespeare Scene Studies, to blog about journalism internships (password protected), to write about food and sustainable agriculture, and to show off their multi-media reporting. Students have debated current events on a blog devoted to reading and discussing the New York Times (password protected), blogged about blogging as journalists, and added stories to Writing New York. Some faculty members have been using Blogs@Baruch as their course management system, while others have used it to try to create public writing opportunities for their students.

For a full listing of course blogs, see our “projects” page.

One project in particular embodied the excitement some faculty members and students bring to their work on Blogs@Baruch. Professor Shelly Eversley, in the English Department, had her American Literature students produce pod and vodcasts that analyzed texts they had encountered over the course of the semester. Buoyed by Cogdog’s “The Fifty Tools”, I did an hour in class on free digital story telling tools (including Voice Thread, Yodio, Gabcast, and Podcast People), and also gave some advice on how to construct a story that balanced narrative, analysis, and style. The students produced amazing work, which they collected here in advance of their voting for the initial American Literature Podcast Awards (the ALPs). They ended the semester with an awards ceremony, and have continued to post their thoughts about the class to the blog in the week since.

Here’s two of my favorite videos from the class:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcU6_WH6mVI[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVXa_MM19-w[/youtube]

Prof. Eversley’s project exemplifies the useful energy that multimedia tools can help students invest in their coursework. These projects are not substitutes for the critical engagement with a text or a canon that some might argue can only be attained through writing an essay; rather, they are additional paths towards that engagement. These students were excited about showing off their work, used the city as a laboratory and an archive, helped each other master the technology, and showed deep engagement with their chosen texts. This is good teaching and learning, and we’re happy to support any faculty member who challenges herself and her students to use a variety of tools and literacies in their effort to produce knowledge.

Kudos to all of our intrepid faculty and their students for providing us with yet more examples of innovative pedagogy on Blogs@Baruch. We look forward to Spring 2010, and in particular two film courses that will be taught on the system. Blogfessors, come on down!

As I noted a couple of months ago, we had severe constraints in launching this project, so we focused primarily on the technological implications of getting it off the ground. We didn’t have sufficient time to either develop a well thought-out curriculum or to work with the Peer Mentors who oversaw the sections to help them pedagogically manage the work of their students. We might have had we gone with a pilot project, but for various reasons that suggestion was scuttled, and we proceeded full-bore.

These caveats aside, I think the project was a resounding success. It’s generated a staggering amount of data and also some important questions for us to address, and also helped us see what’s possible with more thoughtful design and oversight.

More than 6200 posts have been authored by first year students and aggregated into a single space. The vast majority of these posts are student reactions to a variety of “Enrichment Workshops” that they were required to attend. As you might imagine, many of the posts are more descriptive than analytical, and some come across as check boxes to be completed on the way to a requirement. The best posts, however, evidence deep and enthusiastic engagement with the workshops or with other elements of transitioning to life at Baruch.

We’ve already begun to discuss with our colleagues Mark Spergel and Shadia Sachedina how we can encourage posts that students are excited to write and also to read and comment upon. We plan to come up with a range of models and prompts that students can choose from that intersect with some of our broader goals for the project: cultivating digital literacy in our students (I plan to talk and think more with Boone Gorges about this), easing their social and intellectual transition to college, and helping them more nimbly and thoughtfully integrate social media into academic work. I envision a series of assignments that build towards these curricular goals, while also generating the kind of shared reflection that our colleagues in Student Life want to see. I also think we have the great opportunity to show off what interesting lives our students lead. This is a unique institution, and blogging in Freshman Seminar can show the world just what Baruch College and CUNY are about.

The Peer Mentors are key to this improved design.  We’ll expand the training that they get so they’re better prepared to guide their charges. Next semester, four sections of Freshman Seminar are running, so we finally get to run that pilot project we originally envisioned, though with the implications of scaling the thing up already known.  In the summer we’ll likely do some outreach directly to incoming students before school starts so that they are aware of this component of Freshman Seminar, and can hit the ground blogging.

As we plan a new design, we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to make sense of all of the data we’ve collected. It’s difficult, though not impossible, to design an assessment of data that’s been collected without assessment forefront in mind. Ryan Androsiglio, a psychologist in the Baruch Counseling Center, is helping us look at the project to see what questions can reasonably be asked of it.

We were able to perform a much less formal assessment of the program by soliciting feedback from Peer Mentors and First Year Students themselves. Both groups were between lukewarm and mildly-positive in their feedback, and each desired more leeway in what was blogged about and how.  The Peer Mentors I spoke with were quite clear that the strongest component of the project was the social cohesion it encouraged among the students in their seminars.

For a commuter campus like Baruch, FRO blogging has become a powerful tool simply because it creates more opportunities to interact. To encourage this, we’re seriously considering integrating BuddyPress into FRO 2010.

The social benefits of FRO blogging are already crystal clear; we now need to work on defining reasonable curricular goals, and a plan to implement them.

Mikhail Gershovich accepts the Mike Ribaudo Award at the 8th Annual CUNY IT Conference

Two events over the last ten days drew into sharp focus what we have accomplished and also some of the challenges we face. At the 8th Annual CUNY IT Conference, the Schwartz Institute was awarded the Michael Ribaudo Award for Innovation in Technology. Mikhail, Suzanne, Tom, and I were recognized along with administrative teams from John Jay and the CUNY First project, as well as our good friend Matt Gold, Project Director for the CUNY Academic Commons. The Commons is like a sister project to Blogs@Baruch, since we’re using the same software, and we share ideas, labor, and a philosophy about what support for technology at the university level should entail.

It was an honor to be recognized for our innovations and, especially, to share the honor with Matt, since it signaled to the broader CUNY community that the work we’re undertaking is not only viable, but forward-looking and vital to the work of the University. At the risk of sounding like an ingrate, though, I noted that the certificates we received read that this was an “Information Technology” award. I’ve made the point before, and will make it again: instructional technology is not information technology. This is actually acknowledged in how the Ribaudo is awarded, as it’s split between the two areas (even if the split is not represented on the certificate). This is more than a semantic argument: we need to encourage our communities to understand the differences and to constantly reexamine how the University’s information technology architecture relates to and interacts with the deployment of technology in the service of teaching, learning, and scholarship.

It’s always nice to get an award, and last week brought hearty congratulations from inside and outside the Baruch community. In the midst of these pats on the back, however, I learned a little bit more about the difference between information technology and instructional technology. At approximately 7pm on Wednesday evening I happened to look at one of our blogs, and saw the dreaded:

(What follows is a bit technical: click here to jump to the rub).

The error appeared on all subdirectory blogs, while the main blog was completely white. I logged into the command line, verified that MYSQL was running, and saw that the load on our server was fine. The documentation I was able to find suggested either a MYSQL problem or a plugin conflict; I deleted all plugins, with no improvement. Now, instead of the “Error Establishing a Database Connection” I was getting what geeks refer to as the “White Screen of Death” across the entire installation. Having exhausted pretty much the extent of my command line knowledge, I sent out emails to our contacts at BCTC, and waited for a response.

A couple hours later, I was contacted by a sysadmin at BCTC; he had gamely returned to work on his way home from the gym to take a look at our server. He immediately noticed that the directory that holds Blogs@Baruch was about 98% full. We knew that we were approaching space limits, but I had (mis)calculated that we could make it to the end of the semester (when we’ll be moving the entire installation over to a new server). I was puzzled, however, because we had this issue once before and it didn’t cause an outage– it just caused an error in our database backups that resolved as soon as we opened up space. I hoped opening space would clear up our problem, but it did not.

We both thought that the database needed to be repaired, but neither of us were comfortable issuing the repair commands. The admin at BCTC contacted MYSQL, and got assistance repairing and then restarting MYSQL. 1 am, no improvement. We’d have to wait until morning.

At 6 am I took another look at the server to see if I had missed anything, and began to respond to users who were emailing about the site. I posted a query to our premium support forum with Automattic describing the problem, and got a quick response from Donncha, the lead developer of WPMu. Unfortunately, my question included a distracting error that I found in the log that was caused by a bad Phpinfo file I had put on our server (in my haste I wrote the file in Text Edit at home, which put additional characters into the file that I wasn’t able to see). Donncha thought we might have been hacked, and asked me to check our .htaccess files, which looked ok. I caught my mistake, and explained it (along with a note apologizing for not being a system administrator). Apparently I wasn’t clear, because Donncha kept pursuing the PHP error… we weren’t communicating well. He suggested I use error_log() to track down where the PHP problem was.

In the meantime, emails and phone calls from users were flowing in, and I did my best to explain to as many as possible that we were investigating the problem and should be live again soon. Internally, though, I wasn’t so sure; we had exhausted our knowledge and the knowledge in the free forums, and the premium forum to which I was posting wasn’t yielding results. Jim Groom suggested we contact Ron and Andrea Rennick, who I refer to as the “WPMu Wonder Couple,” to see if they might be able to help us out.

Within 3 hrs of Jim’s suggestion, BCTC had vetted Ron and granted him temporary access to our server; he located and fixed the problem in about 20 minutes. In the meantime, Barry Abrahamson, who runs the servers for WordPress.com and also posts to the premium support forum, had offered to do the same.

Turns out the problem was one that I had caused while trying to fix the space issue. When I deleted the plugins in mu-plugins, I failed to delete the Supercache file that sits outside of the plugins folder, inside of wp-content. I also deleted the existing cached pages. Ron concluded that:

Once you ran out of disk space, pages expiring in supercache were being refreshed as empty files. Eventually nearly all of your pages were cached as empty files. I disabled supercache by renaming advanced-cache.php in wp-content. MU checks for the file and includes it in the processing if it exists.

He later added:

I did some testing locally and reproduced the white screen by deleting the contents of the cached version of the index.

Here’s the rub: we got through it. Ultimately this was two small problems masquerading as a big one. We ran out of space, then I failed to properly disable a powerful plugin running on our system, which disabled the entire install. We were down less than 20hrs, and that was only because I wasn’t systematic enough to pick up on the way Supercache works. To a certain extent, something like this was inevitable. All sites go down, even the Big G. It’s the risk you run when you work online, and reasonable end users can accept it– it helps if those running the site aspire towards transparency.

The outage confirmed my belief in open source applications, and particularly the communal ethos that (often) animates them. Three friends: Boone Gorges, Jim, and Zach Davis, offered assistance as soon as they learned of the problem, and moral support because they’ve each been in similar situations. The offers of hands-on help were reassuring, but I didn’t really need them because I was already in contact with the three most knowledgeable WPMu people in the world.

The outage also reminded me that being able to type stuff at the command line and get stuff in return does not make one a system administrator. I’m a humble educational technologist, and I depend on information technology to get my work done. When the lines are blurred– and I blurred them here more out of necessity than conceit– trouble may ensue. Had I been able to look holistically at the problem and troubleshoot it methodically, I probably could have caught the error. But inexperience and the pressure of supporting 3k+ users clouded my vision and convinced me the solution to the problem was out of my reach. These are valuable lessons to carry forward on this project.

Within an hour of Blogs@Baruch going backup, Baruch College’s enews arrived in my mailbox, containing a congratulations to the Institute on the Ribaudo Award. I clicked on a link and landed happily at our pretty little homepage, which was humming nicely along. When I closed my laptop, I still managed to feel pretty good about the week.

PS: I’ve learned that the following cultural artifact can help one oversee an enterprise publishing platform:

Baruch Freshmen at Convocation, September 2009. Click to see photo in its original location.

Yowser.

Each Seminar is directed by a Peer Mentor, a talented upper level Baruch student responsible for helping newcomers adjust to life at Baruch. The seminars meet every other week, and Freshpersons are required to attend lectures, panels, exhibits, seminars, and trainings, distributed across six “enrichment” areas over the course of the term. Then they’re supposed to blog about their experiences, and discuss them when they meet with their classmates.

Launching the project was a bit of bear, as we had to create the blogs, get the users registered, tie the whole deal together, and give some training to the Peer Mentors, who are crucial to the project. Ultimately, I created a custom theme (built on Carrington Blog), with certain core components to which each section would have access– a List of Seminars and Peer Mentors, a Guide to Blogging for Freshmen (produced by the Office of Student Affairs, who directs FRO), a description of the six enrichment areas, and a Google Calendar that displays upcoming events. I then created a Mother Blog, which syndicates posts from across the sixty sections of FRO, using the FeedWordPress plugin. The Mother Blog collects and stores all of the posts in one place, allowing faculty and administrators to look in on the writing that’s happening in FRO. Students are thus contributing to small discussions in their seminars, and also to a broader discussion among all Freshmen.

Thus far, they’ve been writing quite willingly. In the fewer than three weeks since this thing was launched, we’ve aggregated about 900 posts; at the pace we’re going, we should reach well more than 4000 unique posts by the end of the semester. That doesn’t even begin to address the commenting, which has varied in intensity across the individual blogs. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to mirror comments between the original location of the post and the space where it is republished… if we did, and we hope to be able to do that soon, the level of dynamism would increase.

Needless to say, we’re looking at an awful lot of writing, and we’re trying to make sense of it in a few ways. We’ve created categories on the Mother Blog for each of the six enrichment areas so that posts directly pertaining to them can be easily sorted. This will allow the two administrators who oversee FRO– Mark Spergel, the Director of Student Orientation and Freshman Year Incentive, and Shadia Sachedina, the Associate Director of Student Life– to get student perspectives on the wide range of extra-curricular programs the school offers. Further, simple searches will allow certain segments of the Baruch community to see what students are saying about them. For instance, many of the early posts offered student perspective on tours of the library. Our librarians have already begun searching for “library” and “library tour” on the FRO blog to read student responses. Several blog posts have engaged Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, the Freshman text.

Other searches hold the potential to help identify students with like interests: “photography,” “history,” and “football” all offer returns. Such a use of the FRO Mother Blog suggests another function that this project can play, perhaps more effectively in future iterations: social networking. As a commuter campus, we constantly struggle to help our students see themselves as part of a community, and FRO attempts to address that tension. Integrating Blogs@Baruch into FRO makes that attempt much stronger, as students can more easily find, connect, and engage with their classmates through our platform. Next year, I’d love to get BuddyPress working in this project to foreground the social networking component… but, one step at a time.

At the end of the term, we’ll have, easily collected and archived, multiple writing samples from the majority of incoming students. With some more thinking and organization, this holds great potential for assessment, integration into writing instruction, early intervention, and assistance for ESL students. Ultimately, this project allows us the opportunity to further the core missions of Blogs@Baruch: increasing the amount and variety of writing that our students do, and nurturing critical thinking about the use of digital tools throughout the Baruch College community. Given the hectic nature of our launch this year, we weren’t able to spend enough time thinking collectively about the general education opportunities embedded in this project. I had argued that we should do a pilot with 20% of the sections so that we could be sure to more closely support our users and think more intensively about the implications of what we’re doing, but for various reasons, a small-scale pilot wasn’t feasible. But when we do this again, we know that the canvas works, what the challenges are in the mechanics of the thing, and how to improve our planning. We’ll be able to make a more significant investment in helping the Peer Mentors better understand the possibilities and implications of doing college work on the open web, crucial knowledge that they can then pass on to all Freshpersons.

The tag cloud above was generated by participants at CUNY WordCampEd, which took place last week at the Macaulay Honors College (click to enlarge).  Mikhail and I co-organized the event with Joe Ugoretz of Macaulay and Matt Gold of New York City Tech, and we were astounded that we had to close registration a week ahead of time.  When we started planning, we thought we might get 50 registrants, bringing together the folks like ourselves who’ve experimented with WordPress throughout CUNY and who believe deeply in the core components of our mission on Blogs@Baruch.  Instead, we had well over 100 folks who wanted to come, and though we had an overflow room with audio/video connections to accommodate the hordes during morning and afternoon keynote sessions, we still had to turn some away.

The desire to take part in this event — and, even more, the energy palpable at Macaulay throughout the day — are testament that something is happening at CUNY.  This feeling was present in December at the CUNY I(nformation) T(echnology) Conference, which paid more attention to instructional technology than it ever has before.  I think some of the same spirit and energy infused the 9th Annual Symposium, which for the first time, in my opinion, captured the richness and opportunity embedded in our shifting modes of communication.  At all three events, the Twitter backchannel produced what Boone Gorges has called a “catalytic effect” on the proceedings: collective reflection on the presentations by those on Twitter filtered back into the participation of the audience, which found its way back into the tweets, and so on.  I felt very little passivity at these meetings. (Here you can see Tweets for the Symposium and CUNY WordCampEd).

But Twitter only deserves a splash of credit for the sea of enthusiasm present at Macaulay last Friday.  CUNY’s BlackBoard disaster this semester (which you can read about in this piece from The Clarion) no doubt shifted some energy our way as committed teachers and administrators look for alternative edtech solutions.

We welcomed that sort of attention.

In the morning presentations, Jane Wells, from Automattic, pitched WordPress (a bit tongue-in-cheekly) as a “BlackBoard Killer” and emphasized the openness of the WordPress community to input from its users.  Her presentation captured all that we like about experimenting with WordPress: embrace of perpetual beta, humility, the celebration of collectivist approaches to problem solving, and the constant striving to improve. Dave Lester, from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, presented ScholarPress, a suite of WordPress plugins that map course management functionality onto WordPress blogs (doing what BlackBoard does, but much more elegantly and affordably), and also talked about integrating Zotero’s research tools into WordPress.  Baruch’s own Zoe Sheehan Zaldana then wowed the audience with her wonderfully imaginative use of WordPress in photography and digital animation courses, embraced the potential of “shame” on the open web as a pedagogical tool, and emphasized the useful energy created when students participate in a unique space whose aesthetic reflects the work of their course.

Our good friend Jim Groom returned to CUNY like a prodigal son to give the afternoon keynote (“Open By Design”), and spoke eloquently and powerfully about how the role of the instructional technologist should be refined in today’s university, the centrality of “openness” to the mission of CUNY and how that should be reflected in our approach to supporting teaching with technology, and the opportunities self-publishing offer universities to train their students for the future.  He also threw a few good shots at BlackBoard, and raised the very important and underexamined question of why CUNY pours millions– that’s right, millions– of dollars into this clunker of a software instead of investing in the people who build the relationships and the models that inject such powerful energy into events like the IT Conference, the Symposium, and CUNY WordCampEd.  Thanks to Dave Lester, Jim’s talk is archived here.

This was a generative event, and it represented the congealing of a community around the shared idea that our institutions’ weight should be behind a scaling approach to support for educational technology that necessarily goes well beyond BlackBoard.  That box is simply not enough.  Rather than helping us explore knowledge and identity, nurture community, and pass on to our students critical approaches to engaging with information  — core components of a liberal arts education –  BlackBoard argues that education is a marketplace.  Here’s my money.  Give me my single sign on and my learning.

Clearly, the participants at CUNY WordCampEd have had just about enough of this, and are looking to Blogs@Baruch, ePortfolio@Macaualay, the CUNY Academic Commons, and each other for alternatives. With that in mind, I’d suggest that the next stage of edtech at CUNY hold the following core principles.

Instructional Technology is not Information Technology
For too long, instructional technology has been enveloped within the broader notion of information technology.  We need to drive a permanent wedge between those two areas of university life in the understandings of our communities.  Information technology makes our phones and networks and computers and smart boards work, and collects and protects student, staff, and faculty data so that we can get credits and get paid. This is crucial stuff.  But it’s not about teaching and learning.

Instructional technology is about pedagogy, about building community, about collaboration and helping each other imagine and realize teaching and learning goals with the assistance of technology.

There must be a close working relationship between CUNY’s information technology shops and instructional technologists, and they must respect each others’ concerns and interests.  But they must be separate.  When information technologists choose instructional technology solutions, you may get something like BlackBoard, and a community that feels as though the only relationship to technology should be a client-service one.   When instructional technologists administer servers, you may get something like less-than-ideal load times, plugins that expose vulnerabilities, and a system that bursts at the seams when you scale.

We need to acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses, to work with and learn from one another, and also to complicate our community’s understanding of technology.  Some components — like phones and networks — should be, above all, reliable.  Some others — like blended courses, or the integration of made multimedia into a course — require more thought, investment, and understanding from students and faculty.  Making clear the separation between information and instructional technology can help nurture this understanding.

But we must remember… the central mission of a university revolves around teaching, learning, and scholarship.

The Community is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
The most exciting component of CUNY WordCamp Ed was the connection and sharing that took place at the event, a feeling that’s also present on the Academic Commons.  There was the implicit recognition that we have much to learn from each other, that there are many interesting projects popping up around CUNY, and that we can only benefit from making public and sharing our work.  The Commons can provide a canvas for this, but it will not run on its own… it requires, above all, a commitment to sharing, to both taking and giving.  We also should harness and seek to reproduce the generative energy of events such as WordCamp Ed, not only with end-of-the-year conferences and symposia, but with meet ups and sharecases throughout the academic year that disperse that energy.

EdTech Solutions Should Grow from the Bottom Up and then Transplant
Experimentation with WordPress at CUNY has been a bottom-up process, which serves as a counterpoint to the imposition of BlackBoard, a top-down solution.  Blogs@Baruch, ePortfolio@Macaulay, and the Commons each began small and grew as they integrated more users and diversified their functionality in response to the needs of the communities they serve.  As such, they each reflect those communities in certain visible ways.  Blogs@Baruch provides public space for Baruch’s strong journalism, writing, and arts programs, and is making inroads into the Zicklin School of Business and the Freshman Seminar; ePortfolios foreground the unique experiences of the Macaulay student; and the Commons is a vibrant and evolving location for all of CUNY to meet and organize.

A new edtech model for CUNY should acknowledge this progression from the bottom up, and imagine ways to project it outwards throughout the university.  One of the arguments for centralizing administration of BlackBoard was that the community colleges had fewer resources than senior colleges, and centralization of course management software was assumed to make resources more equitably distributed.  Of course, now every school has an equally bad solution.  But the notion that those of us with resources should share the wealth with the colleges who have less is an important one.  I can see a model where senior colleges host WPMu installations for community colleges (using domain mapping), and share support– though, the community colleges– many of which have as many instructional technologists as does Baruch– must pony up support and resources when they can.

Grow from the bottom up and then transplant.

End Users Need to Take Ownership of Online Teaching and Learning Tools
Let’s not be shy about reminding our users of their responsibilities, and our users shouldn’t be shy about asking for help, clarification, or if something is possible.  WPMu and other open source solutions not only benefit from a “do it yourself“ ethos, they require such an approach.  They can’t function and grow without the investment of the community.

A course management system — BlackBoard (at a fraction of the current price), or, preferably, Moodle — could be one component of a tiered support sytem for instructional technology.  Users should have access to an easy way to post documents, access class rosters, and keep a gradebook.  But this is not teaching and learning.  A second tier could exist via distribtued canvases like WPMu or Mediawiki or cloud applications like Flickr and YouTube, where faculty and students can maintain their own spaces and depend on asynchronous support– with a solid server and documentation, such a process can run itself.  A third tier would offer customized solutions for more advances users– Zoe’s rotating flash headers on Blogs@Baruch, or customized spaces to show off class projects or for special departments or programs.  A fourth tier would be a research tier, and entail the imagination and realization of native solutions (such as the Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool) or the exploration of the next wave of innovations (semantic web comes to mind).  You could cover all of the edtech needs of your community with such an approach; all that’s needed, as Jim said, are the instructional technologists and community understanding to shape it and make it operate.

Integrate Digital and Media Literacy into General Education
Universities are constantly updating their general education programs. If they’re not, they should be.  Far too few clear out space for coursework that focuses on exploring how the ways that information is produced and consumed are changing in the digital age.  Such work is often outsourced to librarians, who are generally on the leading edge of a campus’s understanding of these trends, and do yeoman’s (and, often under appreciated) work.  Or students get trickling components of digital literacy spread haphazardly through their work in the disciplines.

Why not, at a place like CUNY, have 1st year seminars devoted to nurturing critical research skills, understanding online information and identity, learning to look and listen, and mastering how to negotiate the digital life of the campus and the city?  Set students up with eportfolios, and teach them how to cultivate their spaces.  Introduce them to scholarly uses of tools with which they are already familiar, but which they perhaps haven’t learned to use critically or with rigor.  Make them write; help them connect, share, and explore the visual, the textual, and the aural experience of the web.  This is something that will be useful to them throughout college and beyond.

As Jim has eloquently argued, CUNY is so well-positioned to harness the energy of the participants in CUNY WordCamp Ed, and to put it to good use.  Let’s keep working.

(IMAGE CREDITS: Thanks to Joe Ugoretz for conceiving, compiling, and sharing the CUNY WordCampEd Tag Cloud.  The other images are from Flickr, in order of appearance: Pip, D’arcy Norman, Ohad, and the Seattle Municipal Archives).

I tried to accomplish a few things with this redesign.  Mostly, I wanted to update the look of the site… the previous version was a bit clunky, a bit 2003 1999, and I didn’t feel it was popping.  As I usually say when Mikhail critiques my design (which is often): I’m no great aesthete, and certainly not a graphic artist.  But I think this version is markedly better, cleaner, and more inviting.  2008.  2009, even.

The inviting part is really the key, because we’d like to make this page not just a portal to the wide range of blogging being done throughout the Baruch College community, but as a sort of digital commons where ideas and resources and teaching and learning can be shared within the community and beyond.  So I’ve tried to structure the new site in a way that makes it easy to share a lot of different kinds of information, and for visitors to peer in and get a sense of how folks are using this technology at Baruch.

The site includes:

A Home Page with featured blogs and links to recently updated and particularly active blogs on the system  At the bottom of the homepage, RSS feeds pull in posts from the CUNY News Wire, from the Baruch College Teaching Blog, from Cacophony, and from the Ticker.  I’m working on a links list that will be customized for particular pages within the site, and will be using this as a space to tinker, to play with, and to show off the functionality that the WordPress community is constantly building.  All of this is living, and will evolve.

An “About” page with a mission statement about this project :

Blogs@Baruch was built on the following core beliefs:

• College students should write regularly in all disciplines and in a variety of formats and genres
• Faculty should have available support for their efforts to create avenues for student communication
• Open-source technology has an important role to play in the future of higher education, and colleges will gain much from experimenting with a wide-range of open-source technology solutions
• Community users of centrally-administered software should share both the burden and excitement of innovating with technology.  While a strong support network is necessary, a do it yourself ethos should be prominent
• WordPress Multiuser is the most powerful and flexible blogging system available, and can be effectively customized to fulfill a wide range of the communicative needs of the college community

A “Projects” page where visitors can take a look at current and past blogs and sites supported by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute.  About three dozen blogs are linked, though some are password protected. Student blogs– we’ve got about 140 going right now– are not linked from this page.

A Blog where we’ll draw attention to specific things happening throughout the system and make announcement that might be of interest to our users.  This space will, over time, we hope, merge with what’s under the “Support” area, where I’m going to be adding to and refining what I hope are helpful materials– FAQs, a manual for WordPress customized for users of this system, suggestions for using weblogs in college teaching, instructional screencasts, and handouts for faculty to use and adapt.  The manual is in need of an overhaul, and this section will be tightened considerably in the coming weeks.

A “Contact” page for visitors to easily contact us.  Features a reCaptcha, for those curious.

Ultimately, we hope users and visitors will find this helpful, and will share in and contribute to the information it provides.  Scott Leslie recently wrote a powerhouse blog post on the ethics of and obstacles to sharing in higher education.  Leslie argues that institution-driven, overly-organized approaches to sharing tend to halt and stutter, while organic, individualized networks are more likely to thrive.  He posits lots of ideas about why and how this is, and concludes ultimately that planning to share gets in the way of actually doing it.  I take and sympathize with his point.

At the same time, I think the technology that eases sharing is still relatively underused and also undertheorized at Baruch and throughout CUNY.  One of our goals is to model just what a distributed learning environment is.  We’ll be using this new space to push, to compile, and to provide paths to useful information for our wildly diverse range of users.  It will ultimately be up to the users of the system to find value, and maybe to contribute some of their own.

The beauty is that they can do that just by getting a blog and sharing their work with the world.  If there’s value, and it’s put out there, it will be found.

In the interest of practicing what I preach– and since I totally relied on the fruits of the Google as I designed the new home for Blogs@Baruch– click beneath the fold for some techie detail on the redesign.  If the words “CSS,” “widgets,” “plugin,” “WordPress theme,” “hackalicious,” and “pwnd” mean nothing to you, no need to read on….

• This new site is based on the Thematic WordPress Theme Framework, which offers 13 different widgetized areas, and the ability to develop child themes using CSS that will allow you to maintain your customized style through theme upgrades.  I should have probably created a child style, but I didn’t figure out how to do so until I was already deep into hacking away at the some of the php and css files.  This might come back to bite me later on, but I’m rather sanguine at this point that I can dig myself out of holes I’ve dug myself into.
• Customization, made possible by a secured version of the Userthemes Management plugin: in the Thematic file structure, I’ve hacked the following files:
  • Sidebar.php: added search and login code
  • Header.php: added click to get home, hacked out the branding code, and tweaked the menu
  • Footer.php: added “Baruch is CUNY” logo, and moved site info down a div tag
  • Library/extensions/hooks-filters.php: added code to make “home” button appear in menu
  • Library/styles/default.css, I hacked to bits; I also an images folder to hold the footer and header images.. the header image is from the Baruch College Visual Standards library of images
  • I made a couple of changes to Library/layouts/2-c-r-fixed.css, which controls spacing of the different areas of the blog
  • I created two Page templates for displaying mediawiki pulls and screencasts without interference from sidebars
• Active plugins:
  • Dagon Design Mailer for the contact page, with reCaptcha active
  • Flickr Badge Widget, to show those Baruch photos on the front
  • Widget Logic, to control what widgets appear on what pages
  • Wiki Inc, to link to the wiki where our manual lives
    • I had some problem with the Wiki Inc plugin, so much of the support section is actually written directly into WordPress, save the FAQs and the screencasts.  For some reason, I can’t get images to pull.  Brian Lamb and Scott McMillan from the University of British Columbia, who work in the group that produced the plugin, generously gave me some of their time, but we couldn’t get it going.  I’ll return to that, because it’s a kick-ass function.

That’s all for my anatomy of a hack.  So easy, even a historian can do it.  If you have any ideas for additional enhancements, please share them.

I’ve become interested in this question while following our Anthropology/Sociology working group, and also through my own surfing.  A relatively new blog–The Edge of the American West–run by historians Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman from U.C. Davis, has quickly become one of the better U.S. history blogs.  What makes it good is a steady flow of mixed content: scholarship and book reviews, “This Day in History” posts, pick-ups on contemporary political issues and reporting, and some discussion of teaching.  Mix in the authors’ fine senses of humor and an occasional reference to sports and, voila, you get pretty good insight into just what it is historians do.

Early in The Edge’s life, Rauchway answered the question, “Why Blog?”  I was particularly struck by his fourth reason:

To change the profession: be the academic discourse you want to see in the world. You want historiography to move quickly, have relevance, be sharper? You can’t make it that way book review by book review: but you can if you blog.

This argument supports the notion of a blog as a personal publishing platform, as an opportunity to get your name and voice out there, and to contribute to the shaping of the discourse in your field.

So, how about it, BLSCI fellows?  Your very own blog, and all the opportunity that comes with it, is now just a click away.

Anthropology/Sociology Faculty Working Group

Diana Rickard, Melis Ece, and I have been running a disciplinary working group with five faculty from Anthropology/Sociology who are using weblogs in their courses for the first time. The project includes seven individual course blogs, and the faculty also contribute their thoughts about using weblogs in their discipline to a shared online space. This project is a fascinating example of how course blogs, even in one discipline, can achieve a range of goals, from pre-writing for in-class presentations, to scaffolding research papers, to extending the classroom, to sharing and exploring related materials in an informal way. Each faculty member has a vision, and has structured their course blog(s) accordingly. It’s exciting to see a group of committed young faculty think through the implications of bringing their courses and pedagogical goals online. The home blog features commentary by our participants, and also houses both links to the individual course blogs and recent posts, which are fed in via RSS syndication.

Leonard Sussman: Digital Photography

One of the great strengths of open source products such as WordPress is the elegant ease with which participants in a course can share their work with one another. Prof. Leonard Sussman, of the Fine and Performing Arts Department at Baruch, gets major props for his willingness to run a prototype of a blog linked to and driven by Flickr.com, the image-sharing site (poetically, the Flickr blog is itself powered by WordPress). Prof. Sussman was unhappy with the quality of in-class critiques his students have been delivering, and desired a space where they could share their work with one another, and, when prompted, do some pre-writing to develop the language with which to talk about photography.

Each student registered for his/her own Flickr account, and then joined a Flickr group called “Sussman Images.” When they submit an image from their own account to the group, that image automatically feeds into the course gallery, which displays images through a lightbox. The images also appear randomly in a sidebar on the front page of the blog, and Prof. Sussman can pull individual images into the main area of the blog for students to comment upon. He hasn’t gotten them writing just yet, but we’re happy to get the data flow set up, and think that this type of sharing, taking advantage of free tools readily available, provides one innovative model for bringing arts classes online.

Zoe Sheehan Saldana: Designing with Computer Animation and Computer Based Image Making

Mikhail has christened Professor Zoe Sheehan Saldana our first “blogfessor of the month” for her “Designing with Computer Animation” course blog. On this site, she’s taken the rotating header function that comes with the Neoclassical WordPress theme and hacked it to accept Flash animations. She then had each of her students design an animated header for the site. If you go to the blog, and hit refresh, the header will change.

Our support for this project was limited to loading up the blog, giving Zoe administrative access, and tossing some ideas around. She did the rest. The result is, as Jim Groom has noted, “an awesome intersection of uses of this online space: sharing resources, publishing platform, collaborating on projects, and a class art gallery.”

Baruch Journalism: Writing New York and Online Newswatch

Few fields have been as deeply impacted by the explosion of Web 2.0 as journalism. Undergraduate journalism departments are scrambling to develop online and new media components to their curricula, and we’re happy to be assisting Baruch’s program as it adjusts. We’re currently supporting two journalism weblogs. One is the continuation of a blog first launched for Professor Roslyn Bernstein’s feature writing course last year, called “Writing New York.” The second is Professor Vera Haller’s resource to help all journalism students follow developments in online journalism, called “OnlineNewsWatch.”

Feel free to check out these sites, and follow them as they build over the course of the semester. There’ll be much more blogging at Baruch in the days to come.

The short presentations combined with the Blackboard wall between the public and the program make it difficult for me to assess exactly how effective the online instruction is. The faculty do seem to feel as though they are teaching and reaching many of their students… this, it seems to me, is the most you can really hope for from a program that’s taught entirely online. Clearly, there are a lot of talented faculty involved in the program and a lot of resources invested, so it seems likely to me that a lot of good work is happening. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about the CUNY Online BA in the future.

No faculty member really wants to teach a course entirely online, but I do feel that this program allows students to complete a degree who, due to work and family commitments, might otherwise find it impossible. The program fits well within the CUNY mission of providing affordable, quality higher education for the diverse population of the city and, judging from what I saw, the instruction is rigorous and demanding. In this case, technology is entirely responsible for making it possible.

The most astounding factoid to come out of this session was the claim made, privately to me, that there hasn’t been a single instance where a student has needed technical aid, because the program orientation covered every possible potential problem. I have a hard time believing this, but if it’s true, that must have been the Best Orientation Ever.