Exhibit A: On March 2nd, I was sitting in an alumni leadership meeting at my alma mater, being briefed on the latest in a string of racist, homophobic, anti-semitic attacks on campus, and the actions the administration had been taking to track down the culprits since the (mostly, but not all, verbal / written) attacks began in early February. Two days later, on March 4th, I woke up to find my Twitter feed blowing up with the news that a person wearing a white hooded robe resembling KKK regalia was seen near a designated campus safe space for students of African heritage in the early morning hours. As a result, all classes were cancelled, a range of educational events were planned, and a convocation / community gathering originally scheduled for later in the week was moved up to take place that morning.

Exhibit B: In mid-March, I returned to work from an out-of-state conference to discover my department would be affected by some (re)organizational shifts, and that the changes were going into effect pretty much immediately. It took us a while to define what those shifts would mean in terms of our workloads and the various responsibilities we all have in the new structure. Basically though, like what happens in most reorgs, for me it meant more and different work.

In both of these cases I took on some additional leadership tasks because I was asked to do so. In Oberlin’s case, this meant writing a short letter on behalf of the minority group I represent, and then expanding on that letter in the campus newspaper a couple of weeks later (alumni leadership members take turns submitting letters to the campus newspaper; it just so happened that it was my turn and the recent events seemed like the only appropriate topic).

In both of these cases I also voluntarily took on some additional work because it was the right thing to do, and although I’m exhausting, it’s also been an incredible learning experience. I’m in a unique position to speak up about changes my colleagues and I would like to see in the new structure at work; reorganizational periods can be amazing opportunities for growth, but only if the institution can overcome its own inertia. Treating others with dignity, kindness, and respect has been and will always be a priority, but being assertive in the workplace is a relatively new practice for me. I’m still trying to accustom myself to the inevitable state of discomfort that accompanies productive conflict …

… which brings me back to what’s been happening at Oberlin. The College has a progressive history, but that doesn’t excuse the racism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, anti-semitism, and other forms of hate and discrimination practiced (consciously or subconsciously) by the institution and its community members, including myself. Despite the microaggressions and marginalization I experience every day thanks to my gender and gender expression (both real and perceived), I benefit a great deal from racial, socioeconomic, and ability-based privilege (among others), including the situational and relative kind. I sometimes fail to call out bigotry when I see or hear it happening to other people; I also sometimes actively participate in hate and discrimination. I’m not okay with that. I’ve never been okay with that. So what changed — why has this particular season been so exhausting? It started with a radical action by current students during a live televised interview.

[Video recap: After a description of the hate-related incidents happening at Oberlin, President Marvin Krislov is interviewed live on CNN. He is standing near the edge of Wilder Bowl, the central campus green space, with the student union building in the near distance. A couple of minutes into the interview, a small group of students begins crossing through Wilder Bowl behind him. They see the interview in progress and begin drawing attention to themselves by jumping around and shouting "no bullshit." After silently waiting a moment to see if the group will disband or stop, they do not, and President Krislov declines to continue.]

From the interview:

Brooke Baldwin, CNN anchor: Mr Krislov, how in the world, this last month, these multiple incidents now, over a dozen incidents of hate … how are students, how are faculty reacting on your tight-knit campus in Ohio?

Marvin Krislov, President of Oberlin College: Well, I think that yesterday was a very important day for us, that it was an educational moment where we took time out from our normal classes to have special classes and special discussions about how we’re feeling, but also the role of race and religion and other issues about the way we relate to each other. And I think that, what I’m hearing from students and faculty and staff today is that they feel very inspired. They feel inspired because this institution has the courage to talk about these issues and to confront concerns, and that that is part of our educational mission.

BB: Why, with all of these incidents happening over the course of a month … why yesterday be the first day that classes are cancelled?

MK: Well, suspending formal classes is very unusual as you can imagine … [students begin chanting in the background]

These students were not just responding to what President Krislov was saying in that interview, at that moment. They were also responding to the larger narrative the administration had been promoting over the previous 36-48 hours. My initial reaction to seeing the clip was, in retrospect, pretty terrible; I immediately judged the students for silencing President Krislov, misrepresenting the student body, and drawing attention away from the real issue at hand. I thought to myself, “these students might have a point, but it’s more important that they be kind, and dignified, and respectful in delivering that message. What they did instead was gross.”

As I realized later, after I’d spent a couple of days on my high horse: if we want to talk about the importance of kindness, dignity, and respect, we need to take a wider view of the situation. Students of color and other marginalized groups affected by hate-related incidents organized a series of community-building events that stressed solidarity, and were relatively patient and respectful for a month while then investigation was ongoing. On March 4th, the situation immediately escalated for students of color; they lobbied the administration to cancel classes for a special campus-wide Day of Solidarity, but only got it after threatening large-scale civil disobedience. When the media came to town over the next couple of days, the College promoted a false narrative, or at a minimum failed to correct a false narrative, that effectively erased the involvement of students of color in the planning and leading the Day of Solidarity. A small group of students publicly raised their voices in protest, and were quickly scolded by a large group of their peers, who demanded a public and formal apology. That petition and demand was later retracted, and other voices came forward to support the protest, but not before almost 200 people signed in support, and not before the petition hijacked attention from the real issue at hand: that a significant portion of the student body was not just embarrassed but afraid for their lives, and justifiably so. Who was being unkind, undignified, and disrespectful now? Me, for one. And so the unpacking began.

I’m not sure why it took this particular series of events for me to truly understand how little I know about the experiences of racial minorities in this country, or to recognize how respectability is a function of privilege. It’s embarrassing and shameful for me, certainly. I’m trying to spend my time and energy thinking not about how ignorant I’ve been, though, as that is a useless exercise that benefits no one. Instead I’m trying to spend that time educating myself about the ways in which I perpetuate and participate in bigotry, either through my actions or inactions, and how to eradicate those behaviors from my daily habits.

What in the world does any of this have to do with edtech? Part of my self-education this month has been seeking out people who can speak about issues of racism, classism, heteronormativism, ableism, etc in a frank and intelligent way, and who can also do so from a perspective I don’t share. A quick audit of my RSS and Twitter feeds was pretty appalling; the Bay Area has helped me understand the importance of active and intentional inclusion, and yet my digital space has historically been pretty homogenous. This is especially true of the edtech sphere I have created for myself.

To be clear: I truly respect, value, and enjoying engaging with the thoughts, experience, and opinions of my current sphere. I’m not suggesting that I always agree with, or have nothing to learn from, people who have a similar perspective to mine. My point is just that I also have a lot to learn from people who do NOT look or sound like me, don’t come from the same background, don’t work in the same kind of institution, don’t have the same abilities/disabilities/learning needs/etc. And I have been doing a really terrible job of seeking out that diversity, of translating the theoretical importance of diversity into action.

So, my goal for the upcoming year is to be more actively and intentionally inclusive in my professional practice. That means, to start, seeking out a more diverse set of edtech practitioners on Twitter and in the blogosphere. That also means educating myself on the issues that I don’t personally experience, but that affect the daily lives of others. For example:

• How does constructing one’s digital identity / reclaiming one’s data work for a student whose computer usage is limited to one or two hours a day on a computer at the public library?
• What processes do we need to put into place to ensure all course websites are fully accessible to all visitors?
• How do I build diversity into all of the conversations I have regarding education and technology, without resorting to tokenism?

None of these issues are easy, and doing a good job will mean constantly confronting my own ignorance and bigotry in the process. It has been and will continue to be exhausting. I will have to constantly remind myself that allyship is a process, not a fixed state of being. I will have to learn to be okay with ruffling feathers. I will likely have to make decisions between doing the right thing, and doing the respectful thing. If what I ultimately want is to change the world, to empty the sea with my teaspoon … I need to remember that being a well-behaved minority is not my goal.

This is a syndicated post; please visit the original to participate in the comments!

In addition to getting the front-facing part of my website in order before this summer, I’ve been thinking about ways I can control (and keep the data from) more of my web-based infrastructure. Tim Owens has really been leading the way on this front, at least in my little corner of the internet; he recently wrote about dropping Dropbox for ownCloud, and has been actively providing information about and access to various other self-hosted options on Twitter.

I would love to work on bringing my entire infrastructure in-house in the future, and I’m really glad that I’ll have someone to chat with about this stuff when I get there. The reality, though, is I don’t have the time at this moment in my life to break the oh-so-intrenched usage patterns I’ve formed over the last decade of using Gmail and GoogleDocs. I’m a very habit-driven person, and the activation energy for me to completely uproot my routines at this point would be astronomical. That’s exactly what Google and so many other companies (web-based or not) count on; their business model isn’t really about fostering customer loyalty. It’s about taking advantage of users’ inability or unwillingness to change, and carefully balancing the desire for maximum financial benefit with the need to refrain from pissing off the user base so much that they leave altogether.

Tightrope Walking, by Krypto | CC BY-NC-SA-2.0

Even though I don’t have the time or mental space right now for a complete overhaul, I know that having so many of my eggs in one basket is tremendously risky, and so I’m looking for small things I can do to move in the right direction. The low-hanging fruit, as it were. One thing I’ve started doing is downloading all of my email into a local installation of Thunderbird; I have years of correspondence in my Gmail account, and have no confidence in Google’s willingness, or ability, to make sure that content is safely backed up somewhere in case disaster strikes.

I also set up a custom URL shortener for myself, using YOURLS, which is basically a set of PHP scripts you download and install on your own webserver. Because “ryanbrazell.net” is a pretty long domain to use for a URL-shortening service, I wanted to purchased something shorter. I’m terrible at naming things, but I was inspired by my successor at Oberlin, who named at least one of his programming projects after a figure from Greek mythology. This was also partially a strategic move … many Greek names end in “me”, and it’s relatively easy (and inexpensive) to purchase a top-level domain with that ending. (Protip: many of the Roman deity names would be perfect for a .us domain.)

Zegris eupheme, by Sarefo | CC-BY-SA-2.5

So, I consulted Wikipedia’s listing of Greek mythological creatures, and pretty soon found a name that was both meaningful and available for purchase: euphe.me. (Eupheme was the Greek spirit of good omen and praise; she is also the namesake of a very pretty species of butterfly, which I only learned while doing research for this post.) For right now, this is a private URL shortener that only I can access; going to the homepage of that domain gives a simple HTML page that serves only to hide the underlying structure of the site. To actually access the shortening service requires going to the admin side of the site, and logging in with a username and password.

Originally, the purpose of my setting up a custom URL shortener was to integrate it with Twitter somehow, so that anytime I tweeted a link, my Twitter app would generate a custom url for me and I could track what kind of usage/clicks those links get. I don’t think this is actually possible anymore; Tweetdeck used to allow users to set a custom URL shortening service, but this option is now gone. Version 2.7.1 now offers only two options: Twitter’s t.co shortener, and bit.ly. Bit.ly does provide a service where you can map your domain to their website, use their engine for short url creation, and access your stats. I don’t know about you … but I’d rather keep my distance from anything whose existence depends even slightly on the good graces of the Libyan government, no matter who is in charge of it. And besides, that wouldn’t be in-house.

Since YOURLS to Twitter hasn’t worked out, I’ve been looking for other ways to use this setup. Today, I stumbled upon YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter, a plugin that makes WordPress use the installation of YOURLS you specify to generate short URLs. This replaces the wp.me links that Jetpack automatically generates and sends to Twitter via the Publicize plugin. When this post goes live, that will be the first real test; we’ll all know when the notification tweet goes out whether it’s as easy to install and set up as it seemed.

Any thoughts about other sites or ways that a URL shortener could be integrated into a self-hosted infrastructure? Do you know of a Twitter client that can use a third-party URL generator? Let me know in the comments!

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When I started building my portfolio last spring, I expected to run both that and my blog off my RyanBrazell.net. After a few months of living with the two intertwined, I realized that the theme I’d picked did lots of great things for the portfolio, but I didn’t like how it was treating my blog. So, I moved my portfolio off onto its own subdomain. I plan to keep it updated a couple of times each year with new projects, but for now it’s not my focus. I’m not 100% comfortable with asking visitors to my sites to navigate two completely different themes — it seems unnecessarily burdensome for visitors to figure out two different navigation schemes — so I will likely revisit this in the future.

Once the portfolio was moved, my next structural consideration was: how would I juggle contributing to two professional blogs, one at RyanBrazell.net, and one at LanguageLabUnleashed.org? In the spirit of taking ownership of my digital identity, it’s important for me to do the bulk of my blogging in my own digital space. But LLU is a really important space to me; I’ve been thinking and playing and putzing on that site since 2005 and it makes me really happy to work collaboratively with other really smart edtech folks in that space. I’m not willing to give that participation up.

Fortunately I don’t have to. I decided that all of my blogging will take place on RyanBrazell.net, but that I will syndicate posts to LLU. To do this, I’m using FeedWordPress to pull just those posts I tag in a certain way over to LLU. I also used FWP to turn off commenting on the syndicated post that appears on LLU. That way, discussions aren’t fractured by different visitors commenting in different places. In practice this setup should be pretty automatic now that it’s configured; this post will (er, should) be the first officially syndicated post from RyanBrazell.net to LLU. The one downside to using RSS for syndication is that I couldn’t make featured images work on the syndicated post. So I can either decide I don’t care about having my featured images on LLU, or I can just go and manually add the featured image to LLU each time I publish a post.

After syndication was set up, I started looking for a new theme for my blog, and came across Pinboard, based on Pinterest‘s user interface. I really like the way it handles featured images, that it’s responsive to browser width, and that it’s less linear than most WordPress themes. There are a couple of things I want to tweak; for instance, the excerpts on the front page don’t tell you when a post was published or whether there are any comments on a post (which perhaps is a good thing, given how infrequently I have posted in this space). But Pinboard comes with a series of formats for posts (standard, aside, gallery, link, image, etc) that I’m interested to explore, and perhaps I’ll wait to add metadata to the front page until I actually have some decent metadata to display

The last step in this weekend’s major infrastructure overhaul was finding a new theme for LLU. Barbara and I had been discussing how the current theme (we were using Arras) wasn’t really working for us, and that we were ready for a change, but neither of us had had time to do anything about it. So when I showed Barbara my new blog theme, she liked it, and we set out to find one that was similar but with a few more bells and whistles. We found another theme called Pinboard, also based on the Pinterest user interface, but with added features great for multi-author blogs (like gravatar hovercards and post metadata display on the front page), as well as the ability to change practically anything about the theme from the Dashboard (no theme hacking necessary!). Given how often we (well, one of us) like to change things up on that site, not having to worry about our changes being erased during a theme upgrade makes me rest a little easier as a site admin.

Lastly but not leastly, Barbara found an awesome and public domain barking dog icon on The Noun Project, and we decided to make it our new LLU “brand,” although it makes me feel a little gross to describe it in that way. Those of you who have followed LLU for a while know that we have always incorporated a dog (or dogs) into our theme; you may even remember the image of Large Marge that used to adorn our site back in the ’00s. We removed Marge from our site’s banner a while ago, but she was still on the LLU twitter feed. No more! This new pup is now our Twitter profile image, our favicon, and even hangs out at the bottom of the LLU homepage to greet anybody who makes it that far.

So! Two sites, both with new digs for a new season. I’m pretty excited about these changes, and am looking forward to blogging more regularly this spring and summer. Take a look around both RyanBrazell.net and LanguageLabUnleashed.org and let me know what you think — I’ll be interested to hear any thoughts you have about either space!

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My colleague Sean runs a workshop and blog called “The Better Presenter.” Sean has a great eye for visual design, and is really good at explaining and demonstrating how to make presentations suck less. Although I still have a very, very long way to go, I’ve been able to apply a lot of the lessons he’s taught me towards making my presentations, handouts, and my portfolio more visually interesting.

One of the major points I’ve learned from Sean is that consistency is important. From his recent post on Finding and Using Images:

Visual cohesion is important, and this applies to more than just the color palette and fonts used on your slides. Try to use graphics that are similarly styled, i.e. photos vs. illustrations. Use your presentation tool’s graphic styling options to add the same effects to all of your images throughout the presentation (i.e. borders and drop shadows). [emphasis mine]

In my ePortfolio’s theme, there are two different places to include images. The first is a relatively small thumbnail (or, in WordPress parlance, a featured image) that appears wherever multiple portfolio items are listed. The second is a larger image that appears at the top of each individual portfolio item’s page. The two images never appear in the same place, so don’t have to match, but I could feel myself starting to worry about consistency. For some projects, like workshops and presentations, the visual evidence I have is a handout created through Apple’s Pages. For teaching projects, the evidence is a photo of me working with a group of people. For some projects, I don’t have visual evidence at all.

invisible, by andrew cameron. from the noun project collection.

After taking a deep breath and dropping my shoulders, I reminded myself that my ePortfolio will be a work in progress for a while, and it doesn’t have to be perfect right away. (Have I mentioned that I am both an overachiever and a perfectionist?) I decided the best way to move forward was to find a single source of images that were consistently styled, easy for me to work with, and could provide a reasonable representation of my projects until I could develop another strategy.

For this, I turned to The Noun Project (TNP). I first learned about this collection a couple of years ago when Justin, my successor at Oberlin, used images from TNP as icons in the process of redesigning the CILC ‘s website. The Noun Project is a great resource because many of the images are free as in speech, and all of them are free as in beer. What’s problematic about TNP is that all of the images are vector graphics. This means they will scale up or down without any loss of quality (see Wikipedia’s article on vector graphics for more information), but it’s a different format than most casual users are accustomed to working with.

I personally have never worked with vector graphics before. I have Adobe’s Creative Suite installed at work, but I have little experience with Photoshop and zero with Illustrator. Here at home I only have GIMP, which I love but which will not open the vector graphics from TNP. There is another open-source graphics editor, Inkscape, which is designed to work with vector images, but I was really not interested in learning a whole new piece of software just to create images. I wanted something quick and easy, and so after a little experimenting, I came up with a workaround process:

1. Use OS X’s built-in screen capture process (command+shift+4, then drag the cursor) to take a screenshot of the Noun Project image I wanted to use.
2. Open that screenshot in GIMP, use the “Select -> By color” option to select and cut the black part of the screenshot.
3. Go to “File -> Create new”; GIMP will automatically make the new image’s canvas the same size as the screenshot that’s still open. Open the Advanced Options and set “Fill with” to Transparency before hitting okay.
4. In the new image with a transparent background, paste the image from the clipboard.
5. Adjust the new image to match the size of the final image you want to create. I needed to make a relatively square image fit into a rectangle without being stretched. I first used “Image -> Scale Image” to get the right height (310 in my case), then used “Image -> Canvas size” to get the right width (640). Be sure to center the image before you save the new canvas size!
6. Save the image as an editable file (GIMP makes an XCF), this way you can easily make adjustments later without having to re-do steps 1-4.
7. “File -> Export” the file as a PNG.
8. If you need images of different sizes, now’s the time to make them. I needed a second version of the image to be 310 x 170, which I made by using “Image -> Scale Image” and setting the width to 310. This left me with a height of 150, so I used “Image -> Canvas size” to change the height to 170 and re-center before exporting to PNG.

By the time I’d done this two or three times, I could create a pair of images from TNP within 2-3 minutes. Eventually I’ll learn to work with vector graphics, but I’m pleased with the way these images turned out for now. I’m currently using images created using this method for all of the portfolio item thumbnails, even though I’ve recently managed to find different images for the individual portfolio item pages (like this one).

A list of images from The Noun Project currently in use on my ePortfolio.

The one thing I have yet to figure out is how to properly include evidence from workshops and presentations. Ideally I’d like to embed the actual handouts I created for these workshops, but as I discovered after a couple of hours of troubleshooting yesterday, PDFs created by Pages don’t display certain elements properly when they’re opened via GoogleDocs or Acrobat Reader. PDFs created via other applications embed properly — see the OLA Newsletter entry — so I know it can happen, I just have to find a workaround for my existing documents. I tried using Preview to export each of the individual PDF pages as a JPG (which flattens all of the elements so they’ll display properly) and then recombining that into a new PDF, but it ends up being over 24MB in size, which is ridiculous and unacceptably large. Using Preview’s “Reduce File Size” function brings it down to 300kb, but then you can’t actually read anything, it’s too fuzzy. Ugh.

[UPDATE] I spent a little time with Acrobat Pro, and it turns out that you do need to flatten the PDF pages into images, then reassemable them with Acrobat in order for them to display properly on all PDF readers. Here’s the process I used to make my PDFs from Pages display properly:

1. Open the PDF in Preview, and make sure View ->Thumbnails is turned on.
2. Click on the first page’s thumbnail, then go to File -> Export.
3. Set the Format to JPEG, Quality to Best, and Resolution to 300 pixels/inch. Click OK.
4. Repeat steps 2-3 for each page of the handout.
5. In Acrobat Pro, choose File -> Combine -> Merge Files into a Single PDF…
6. Drag and drop the JPEG files you just created into the window, and make sure they’re ordered correctly. Click Combine Files.
7. Save the combined PDF — it’ll probably be big (about 5-6MB per page).
8. Go back to File -> Save As and make sure to choose Adobe PDF (Optimized) from the drop-down menu. This will reduce the size of your finished PDF to about 200-300KB per page.

The last step isn’t completely necessary, but when you’re embedding PDFs into a website it makes a huge difference to load a 1MB file instead of a 25MB one. Overall this is a really annoying process, but given how easy Pages makes it to create the original document to begin with, I’m willing to put up with a little extra work after the fact.

It’ll be a couple of weeks before I can spend another chunk of time on my ePortfolio, but after I’ve cleaned up a few more things and entered another batch of items, I’ll be back here to wrap up this series of blog posts. Questions, suggestions? I’d love to hear from you in the comments, below!

Now that I’ve got the bones of my ePortfolio in place, it’s time to start adding some meat. The first question I always ask faculty members when they approach me for help with a new technology is: what do you want the outcome of this to be? I already partially answered this question back at the beginning of this project, but I have an addendum to make.

I want my ePortfolio to be a fundamentally different thing than my résumé. I want my ePortfolio to represent the skills I’ve learned, regardless of whether I learned them formally in a classroom, or via volunteering in my local community. To me, formal and informal spaces are equally valid places to learn, and so I want to actually treat them as equals in this space. Ideally, this ePortfolio would one day replace my traditional résumé altogether. (Learning is messy, so I’m not sure why we as a community insist upon reporting our skills using flat, linear structures. But that is a whole ‘nuther discussion, and I’ll get off my soapbox now.)

With this outcome in mind, and in the process of actually building the first few projects, I came up with a few rules to help keep me on track.

1. Each portfolio entry will consist of a single project.
2. The project I accomplished will always be more important than the place or organization I was working for at the time.
3. I don’t work in a vacuum, so credit will always be given to others who were part of the accomplishment.
4. Comments on portfolio items will be left open.
5. Last but not least, each portfolio entry needs to have the following items in order to be considered complete:
   1. A title that succinctly describes what I did (i.e. the name of the task I completed or the position I held)
   2. A subtitle that provides greater context to the title (i.e. what organization the project was for, and when it was completed)
   3. A description of the project and my role / responsibility in making it a success. This doesn’t have to be any particular length, but it does need to be an honest accounting of what I did. No overstating or extreme humility allowed.
   4. An image which provides visual context, ideally a photo taken during the project.
   5. Any additional evidence (workshop handout, podcast recording, etc) will be embedded, not made downloadable, wherever possible. I’m not concerned about ownership, I just want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to actually see the work I’ve done.

Looking back on this list, I’m realizing it can be pretty well restated as:

1. Be honest.
2. Be kind.

Honestly, though, I’ve populated a dozen projects at this point, and the first set of rules seem really micro-managey, but it was helpful to really think about the process as I went through it. Many of these rules were largely dictated by the theme I’m using — when I create a new portfolio item, it already has fields for a lot of this information, so I don’t even have to think about formatting, just about entering the information.

Some rules, like rule #1, I changed my mind about halfway through, and it meant I had to go back in and re-do a bunch of work. For example, I originally created “Language Lab Unleashed” as a single portfolio item. Then I realized that there were several projects hiding underneath — webmaster, author, and podcast producer — so I broke those three projects out. It means each of the three project descriptions are a little shorter, and I’m risking some redundacy, but I think it’s a more honest accounting of the work I did.

Other rules that I didn’t expect to be problematic (see rule 5.5) took up a bunch of my time. I spent several hours this morning trying to figure out why the PDFs I was trying to embed wouldn’t display properly.

After trying to find a PDF-embedding plugin that doesn’t use GoogleDocs, and experimenting unsuccessfully with iframe tags, I realized I was making a pretty terrible assumption about what the problem was. As it turns out, PDFs created by Pages (and most of my PDFs are) don’t play well with GoogleDocs or with Adobe Acrobat. Even if I could get it to look okay on my MacBook, a majority of visitors would be treated to documents that really look terrible, and that is NOT the impression I’m trying to make. In order to keep moving forward, I had to publish a couple of projects without PDFs embedded, or even linked, to the post.

One thing I didn’t expect was for the requirement to provide visual context (rule 5.3) to actually be FUN. I ended up using a bunch of images from The Noun Project as the thumbnails, and even though I had no experience dealing with vector images (and no software that would handle the files!) I managed to come up with a quick and easy workflow to get them off the website and onto my portfolio within three minutes.

I’ll share that process and more information about the problems with my PDFs, in my next post. For now, though, my question to y’all is — is this monster I’ve set up starting to make sense? When you visit my ePortfolio, can you find your way around? Do you start to get a sense of my skill sets? Is there anything missing that you’d want, or expect to see? Any feedback and suggestions are welcome!

As I mentioned last time, it took me a while to move forward with my portfolio because the task seemed too ginormous, and I was having a hard time breaking it down into bite-sized chunks that my brain could handle. This was partially caused by my wanting to add a ton of content, but it was also because I felt really insecure about how I would use WordPress as a visual structure.

I knew that I wanted each project to exist as a post, and that each post would contain a written description of the project along with an image, an embedded PDF, or some other visual information that would provide better proof of what exactly I’d done. I also knew that I wanted to use categories to group projects into major headings (Publications, Customer Service, eCourse Development, etc), and tags to relate posts to one another regardless of category. So far, so good — all of these things are totally easy to do with WordPress. But how was I going to make it look good?

scaffolding, via keith1999 on flickr

I happily proceeded to the WordPress themes directory to find something that would make my portfolio look clean and organized. My dirty little not-so-secret? I don’t know a thing about visual design. Sure, I can point at things and say “That looks pretty” and “I like that.” But when it comes to figuring out how to actually make something that looks nice? Nope, don’t ask me. I’m also terrible at picturing what things would look like based on a model. I have to see the thing in action in order to mentally make sense of it. After a while, the thousands of themes available started to look pretty much the same.

To narrow things down, I tried searching the themes directory for “portfolio” and got about 20 themes optimized for showcasing a visual portfolio. These themes would be great for photographers, who may want to include a brief explanation that goes along with each item, but for whom the emphasis is on the visual. I knew I wanted to have an image to represent each item, but it wasn’t supposed to be the most prominent part about the portfolio. The other tricky piece about this was that I wanted to use my site as a portfolio AND as a blog, preferably in the same place. Most portfolio themes I found assumed that visual artifacts would be an emphasis of the blog as well.

So I did something I’ve never done before: I started searching the paid theme sites. I’m very committed to the idea of WordPress as an open and free resource, and so in the past I have balked at paying for either plugins or themes. At the same time, I’m a big believer in paying people what they are worth, and in supporting the people that make products I like and use frequently. What I wanted was clearly more advanced than anyone was willing to do for free, so it was time to find a professional.

After browsing a lot of paid themes that placed the same emphasis on visual artifacts as the free themes I’d looked at originally, I finally came across one that seemed like it would work: Spark. It can handle both portfolio items and a blog, it looks really clean and organized, and even though it was created for visual artists, it gives equal weight to visual and written evidence. As I discovered after I installed the theme on my site, Spark does this by making blog posts and portfolio items into completely separate things within the WordPress infrastructure.

Portfolio items have their own set of categories and tags that are separate from the blog’s categories and tags, and there are widgets available for each set so they can be displayed separately. This way, your blog’s tags don’t take over your portfolio’s tag cloud, and vice versa. I hadn’t even thought this was possible, but after working with it for a couple of days it seems obvious. So far I’m very happy with how it looks and works, and this weekend’s project is to continue populating it with content.

Next in the “Building My ePortfolio” series: I’ll talk about how I’m populating my portfolio, including the process by which I’m finding and/or creating images to represent individual items. Feel free to take a look at what I’ve done so far, and let me know what you think!

Since my last post in March, my portfolio-building process has gone something like this:

1. Write a blog post explaining what I want to do and why.
2. Pull together a list of items to include in my portfolio.
3. Visit my portfolio site every couple of weeks over the next six months.
4. Think about what I want the portfolio to look like, but decide I don’t have time at the moment.
5. Be surprised that the portfolio has not magically appeared yet.

Lesson one: building a portfolio is hard work, yo. I didn’t anticipate how intimidating it would be. As the list of potential portfolio items grew longer and longer, I lost sight of the small steps I could take and instead kept picturing this mountain of work that I needed to do in order to complete the project. It looked something like an alot monster.

via allie brosh’s awesome comic, hyperbole and a half

Finally, last weekend I was able to remind myself that the best and only way to eat an elephant, or in this case an alot monster, is one bite at a time. Also, it occurred to me that the entire point of an ePortfolio is that it’ll never be finished, not as long as I continue to do work that I’m proud of. And hopefully I’ll be doing that for a long, long time.

Lesson two: drop your shoulders, and don’t forget to breathe.

So I changed my strategy a little. Instead of trying to pull together all of my content and get it organized in advance, I promised myself that I could start with just one thing I’d done. For that one thing, I needed to figure out why it made me proud, and write a description of it. I picked LLU, given that this site is something I’m very proud to participate in, and that I’ve been doing it for almost seven years.

Funnily enough, as I was writing the description I realized that underneath the LLU umbrella are three separate projects: hosting and maintaining the bones of the site, producing webcasts/podcasts, and participating as an author/commenter. Instead of writing one very loooooong description, I broke them out into separate items. Now that I’ve got those three items in place, I feel much more capable of tackling the rest of the items on the list. They may not all get done this week, or even this year, but that’s okay.

Lesson three: the first step is the hardest.

Now that I have a little content to work with, it’s time to build the platform. I’m fully committed to the WordPress ecosystem, and so need to find a structure that will allow me to manage a portfolio and a blog at the same time. I’m testing a theme call Spark right now — feel free to take a peek. More on that coming soon in Part 3: Choosing a Platform, Part 4: Populating Content, and Part 5: A Body of Evidence.

A couple of years ago, I purchased a couple of domains with the intention of creating a professional ePortfolio for myself. It’s been on my to-do list for too long now, as has “writing more frequently on LLU.” So, in the interest of killing two birds with one stone, I’m going to be creating an ePortfolio, and blogging the process here, warts and all.

via flickr user devoinregress (click for original)

This evening, my task was simple-ish. All I had to do was answer one question: what do I want the outcome of this to be? Well, of course I’m not satisfied with one outcome … I want several, in no particular order:

• to gather evidence of my own learning and professional development
• to better market myself the next time I am looking for employment (although to be clear, this is not imminent)
• to have a better understanding of the tools available to individuals looking to build or support ePortfolios
• to gain experience in a skill many higher ed institutions are requiring or encouraging students to practice
• to document the process of building an ePortfolio for my future reference, and that of LLU community members
• to be more engaged in the LLU community

The plan is to finish this project before I go on vacation in a couple of months, so expect to see regular (hopefully weekly) posts from me over the next couple of months. My homework before the next post is to gather content I’ve created — documents, text descriptions, images, videos, links, etc — and to start thinking about ways to organize it. I’ll be looking to y’all to help with inspiration and to keep me honest, so don’t be shy about chiming in with comments, suggestions, criticisms, or questions!

Today’s question for all of you: have you created an ePortfolio for yourself? If so, post a link and contribute your best advice! If not, what’s stopping you?

What else does it take to be a not-good-but-great educational technologist, from your perspective? Inquiring minds want to know your thoughts …

For home users, the App Store is doing for desktop software what the iTunes store did for music: shortening the time it takes small-scale developers to make their products available to the masses, making physical media unnecessary, and providing immediate gratification to the consumer. Similar to the way mobile device app purchases work, all you need is an account with a credit card, and your new software is automatically and immediately downloaded and installed. Have multiple computers at home? Just attach each of the computers (up to five) to a single Apple account, purchase one license of your software, and install it (legally!) on all five computers. Awesome.

For large groups of users (i.e. those with more than 20 workstations), the App Store is not-quite-so-awesome. Business, non-profit, and education users aren’t allowed to take advantage of the “buy-once-install-five-times” rule; you have to purchase a single license for each and every workstation you want to have that software. This is a minor annoyance but not a change. To make the purchasing easier, Apple has an App Software Volume Licensing program, and educational institutions get a 50% discount on Apple software like OS X Lion, iLife, and Final Cut Pro X (although not on software from third-party developers). Importantly, you can still deploy App Store software purchased in bulk via mass-installation techniques. Set up one workstation exactly how you want it, clone that setup onto any number of other workstations, and you’re good to go. The catch? You have to purchase at least 20 licenses at a time. This usually isn’t a problem for the initial purchase — if you have 24 workstations, just buy 24 licenses and get them for the price of 12. Done. What happens later, though, when your lab expands and you need 6 more licenses? You’ll have to pay full price for those 6, which is a drag, but the real problem is you can’t use the Volume Licensing program at all unless you are making a purchase of at least 20 licenses, even if you have bought in bulk in the past.

So, how do you purchase more than 1 but fewer than 20 licenses in an educational, non-profit, or small business environment? This is where the nightmare really begins. Here’s the process:

1. Acquire one email address for every workstation you have. Each AppleID can be used to purchase only a single license of the software, and each AppleID needs a unique email address. I would recommend creating one address for each workstation you have, even if you don’t plan on buying that many licenses right now. Get these from your institution if you can, or just set up a number of accounts using free providers like Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail. (Quick tip: Gmail will only allow you to create 10 accounts from a single IP in a short period of time. If you need to create more, just switch computers, or use a different connection method. Also, if Gmail thinks you’re a bot, it’ll want to send you a verification code via SMS or voice call. Have a phone handy.) To keep your sanity, you’ll probably want to set these email addresses up to forward to a single location, which of course means verifying that your forwarding address actually belongs to you, once per email address.
2. Manually create AppleIDs using each of your new email addresses. If you have a departmental credit card that you can use to buy software and that you don’t mind entering into each and every account, just go to My AppleID and create the accounts. If you don’t have a departmental credit card, or don’t want to have it stored in a large number of accounts, the process is a little harder. Apple has done a good job of documenting the process of creating an AppleID without a credit card, so I won’t recreate those instructions here. Keep in mind that Apple will only allow you to create 3 AppleIDs from a single IP in a short period of time. If you need to create more, just switch computers, or use a different connection method.
3. Associate the new AppleIDs with your workstations. Log into your administrator account on the workstation (whichever one you use to install software), go to the Applications folder, open the App Store, and log in with one of the new AppleIDs. I’d recommend keeping track of which AppleID belongs to which workstation, just to make your life easier moving forward.
4. Purchase, download, and install applications on each workstation. If you have a departmental credit card that you can use for this purpose, go ahead and use the App Store on each workstation to purchase, download, and install your app. If you don’t have a departmental credit card to associate with each of your accounts … well, everybody’s situation is going to be different. If you have an institutionally-based Apple Store, you can probably use a purchase order to buy iTunes Gift Cards, which you can then redeem in the App Store. If you don’t have an institutionally-based Apple Store, you may need to use a personal credit card to buy iTunes gift cards and then submit the receipts for reimbursement, or check with your Purchasing office and see if they can use an institutional credit card to buy iTunes gift cards on your department’s behalf. Either way, you’ll want to purchase separate gift cards for each workstation, for the exact cost of the software you plan to purchase, and you’ll need to sit down to purchase/download/install the software separately on each workstation.

For a company that prides itself on making usable, elegant products, this is a complete and total failure. It seems like Apple didn’t think, or just didn’t care, about how the App Store woud negatively impact the medium-sized organizations that use its products. And when we talk about disruptive technologies … this is NOT what we mean.

My institution has been particularly hard-hit by this for a number of reasons, including the fact that we have no departmental credit card, and no longer have a campus-based technology store, but that’s a whole nuther story. I’m interested in hearing from the rest of you: how is this impacting your department or campus? Do you have ideas or information about how lab managers can make this process easier? Have I missed something really obvious? Leave a note in the comments!