Category: higher education

CASE Summit 2013: Let the disruption begin

The 2013 CASE Summit for leaders in advancement begins today (Sunday, July 14) and continues through Tuesday, July 16. I’m here in San Francisco for the Summit, but probably will do more tweeting than blogging during the event. (A post-summit blog post in this space is almost certain.) So if you want to know what topics, speakers and sessions are piquing the interest of Summit attendees, your best bet is to follow the Twitter feed: #CASESummit.

This promises to be a terrific conference. The lineup of speakers, presenters and panelists is amazing. (I get to introduce one of them: Francis Flynn, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, who speaks twice on Monday on “Communication and the Art of Persuasion.”) And the conference’s overarching theme of disruption is more relevant now than when I wrote a preview of this conference back in May.

If you’re here in person, I hope we get to meet. I’ll be the guy tweeting on what appears to be an Etch-A-Sketch.

WPHighEd: A new resource for #highered WordPress users

If you’re using WordPress as a blogging platform or content management system at your institution, there’s a nifty new resource available for you: WordPress in Higher Education, or WPHighEd for short.

Screenshot of the WPHighEd website (wphighed.org)
Screenshot of the WPHighEd website (wphighed.org)

The site is the creation of Curtiss Grymala (@cgrymala) of the University of Mary Washington, where Curtiss has implemented WordPress to run 50 separate “multisite” instances on a single WordPress installation. He created the site as a resource for the higher ed community, where higher ed WordPress users could share ideas on WordPress best practices. Specifically, Curtiss hopes the site will become a resource that will:

  • Serve as a showcase on how colleges and universities are using WordPress. “Not just for traditional websites,” Curtiss says, “but for blog systems, learning management systems, or whatever.” He encourages people to submit examples of how they’re using WordPress at their colleges and universities.
  • Be a blog where users may contribute WordPress news, tutorials and research related to higher ed.
  • House a collection of WordPress-related presentations, papers, etc.
  • Serve as a hub to host regular virtual meetups for higher ed WordPress users.

The site is still in its infancy, but it has the potential to become a very useful resource for those using WordPress, or wanting to.