Wordpress and Omeka

Tinkering

Wordpress is a site-building platform. Originally meant to support blogs, Wordpress now powers all sorts of websites, and may be useful if you, for example, want to publish a collection of student essays without having to design a site and build a database yourself. You can host your own Wordpress installation at UBCO (IT Services can help you set it up), or you can use Wordpress' servers to host your site (although you may then run afoul of BC regulations against storing student data on servers outside of Canada).

Omeka lets you add truly robust metadata (or, to put it another way, information about your files) to your digital resources, and publish them online as thematic exhibits. It was designed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (the folks behind Zotero, a great bibliography and note management tool). Like Wordpress, you can host Omeka on your own server, or use theirs.

Omeka is an excellent platform for large ongoing projects. The challenge is to design an assignment will a reasonable learning curve and outcomes that lets students make a real contribution to the larger project.

The Assignment

Learning Outcomes

What will students who have learned successfully from this assignment understand or be able to do?

Plan the Assignment

What are the steps in this assignment? What will the content of the student's pages be? How will the students experiment, build, and then communicate their work? How does this assignment fit in with the rest of the course?

Rubric

Design a rubric that clearly articulates fair, good, and excellent process, product, and argument. Link the evaluation to the learning outcomes.

Tutorials and Guidelines

Existing Omeka and Wordpress Sites

Wordpress

Omeka