Last summer, in preparation for the pilot, I set up WPMU 2.7 with the following plugins installed across the site:

- PageMash – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pagemash/
Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

- Search Everything – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-everything/
This plugin increases the ability of the default WP search (including pages, tags, etc.).

- tags4page – http://www.michelem.org/wordpress-plugin-tags4page/
This plugin allows you to tag pages (posts can already be tagged).

- WPLicense – http://wiki.creativecommons.org/WpLicense
WpLicense is a plugin for WordPress which allows users to select a Creative Commons license for their blog and content.

- WP Pages Only – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pages-only/
This plugin simply changes the default “Write” and “Manage” links in admin to go to pages instead of posts.

Just these few plugins make WPMU quite usable as a no-frills OCW platform. Obviously, this setup lacks the full functionality of something like eduCommons, but you can also migrate from version to version in seconds with a single Subversion command, and we know that this platform scales to tens of millions of pageviews per day (e.g., wordpress.com).

IPT 287 does a number of other interesting things with other plugins, like syndicating all student work into the OCW site using FeedWordPress. Charles also utilized the blog functionality of WPMU to do live announcements, etc., on the site – actually teaching his course off the OCW site. This is another part of the beauty of WPMU – per course functionality.

It’s summer again, which means it’s time for open.byu.edu’s WPMU install to get an upgrade to 2.8 and for me to look for additional plugins and bits of functionality that any self-respecting OCW platform should have. We’ll also be growing the scope of our pilot this year (after doing only two courses last year). I’ve already started chatting with the good Reverend about some of the additional functionality we’re going to need as our pilot expands in scope… But I’d love your thoughts, too. What do you think as WPMU as an OCW platform? What functionality is WPMU with above plugins missing that it desperately needs? Are there existing plugins that provide that functionality?

However, as we ramp up to include more participants this year I’ve started wondering about the URL structure of having multiple departments participate. What I would love to do is still assign one blog per course, but be able to organize these under “subdirectories” as follows:

http://open.byu.edu/ipt/692/

http://open.byu.edu/comd/411/

http://open.byu.edu/eime/515/

&c. You get the idea. I haven’t been able to spend a ton of brain power on it, but I can’t figure out how to get the /ipt/ or the /comd/ in the middle there. Any thoughts?

Also, I’m wondering what to do URL-wise about courses like IPT 692. This is an Advanced Issues seminar and is taught multiple times each year by different faculty. Multiple times each semester, in many cases. How should I proceed? /ipt/692/wiley/? And how should I archive these? /ipt/692/wiley/2009/fall/?

Facebook’s approach is a classic old-fashioned business model propped up by creating artificial scarcity where none actually exists. It’s much like the problems with the academic publishing businesses right now. The journal publishers want me to come up with a great research idea, go find funding for the work, do the work, write up the work, and then completely sign over all the rights to my work to them – so that I have to pay a license fee to use my own writing with my own students in my own classroom. Facebook wants me to have meet lots of people, make friends with many of them, spend my time connecting the dots between myself and my friends online, and label our relationships, so that Facebook can tell me I don’t have permission to use my own work. Springer, Elsevier, and Facebook… just another couple of data silos.

So Justin and I asked each other, instead of making it easier to get our data out of those silos, why trap our data in those silos in the first place? Let’s just bypass the whole problem. In the same way that we publish our research results on our own blogs instead of having the results hijacked by (published in) peer-reviewed journals, let’s take the same approach with our identities and social networks.

This would have to get implemented somehow, and since Justin and I are both WordPress users here’s what we’re thinking:

• There doesn’t need to be a social network to join – you don’t need to pour your data into yet another silo.
• Your personal blog is the perfect place for all your profile information (a la Facebook) and your identity information (including the kinds of stuff you would aggregate and share via FriendFeed) to be aggregated and displayed. It’s your site; why not keep all your information about yourself and your friends there?
• Existing blog mechanisms like trackback and trackback moderation already show us how we can set up an “Add a Friend” feature in which we can build up a list of friends annotated with relationships (aka a social network) and then expose this list as XFN, FOAF, and whatever else you like (seems like RDF would be a natural choice).
• Existing plugins let us replicate most of Facebook and similar sites’ functionalities, including extended profiles, a “mini-feed” of what your friends are doing, the ability to “poke” friends, and of course the plugin architecture gives you an open platform for extending core functionality (replicating Facebook isn’t the end goal, but if we can’t “at least” do that it will be hard to get traction)
• Additional plugins could take us quickly beyond what Facebook and other sites have to offer
• Once your identity becomes completely intertwingled with your blog, things like OpenID start to make much more sense – your username is now also the URL to your identity
• &c.

This no-silos / everyone owns their own data approach gives you a fully distributed social network. WordPress-Multiuser and existing plugins give you 70% of the fully distributed network. Let’s do the last 30%! Let’s not just “open” social networks, let’s fully distribute them and take back control. Let’s not just demand permissions to use our own data, let’s just own our own data so that we don’t need anyone’s permission.

Justin is blogging some of the other people thinking this way. I know Brian and Jim and Darcy are keen on extending WP-MU to support more personal, intimate learning experiences. Who else out there is interested?