Tenure and Promotion portfolios on WordPress

Since 2009, over a hundred faculty per semester have built course blogs on WordPress to host discussions, share content and announcements, or have students post projects. ACU Blogs has proven to be a flexible platform for teaching in many disciplines across campus and this fall will be available to faculty going up for tenure or promotion.

Monday in the Adams Center we’ll host the first discussion on producing your portfolio on WordPress. Here are just a few of the topics we’ll cover.

  1. Creating Posts and Pages (Pages–>Add New)
  2. Using Categories and Parent Pages
  3. Linking to content (within the blog or on the web)
  4. Uploading content (Media–>Add New)
  5. Embedding content from YouTube/Vimeo
  6. Customizing the theme (Appearance–>Themes)
  7. Customizing the horizontal menu (Appearance–>Menus)
  8. Customizing the side menu (Appearance–>Widgets)

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If you haven’t seen the sample portfolio produced by the University Tenure & Promotion Committee, you’ll find it here.

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Copyright lunch in the Adams Center

Thanks to Kenneth Pybus for presenting today on the relationship between copyright, fair use, and campus blogging. Walking through copyright myths, examples of typical teaching uses, with considerations of fair use both on campus and online.

Parody on Fair Use

One of Kenneth’s examples is a famous recent case where the film Downfall (2004) has regularly been used in mashup parodies of everything from Hitler’s feelings about Brett Favre to Windows Vista. This follow-up is a parody of a parody.

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ACU Profs on Fair Use

A couple other resources you may find useful. The first is a conversation Kenneth and Mike Wiggins recorded last year to clarify the implications of fair use on campus.

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Resources from the Media Lab

For more information on content use and creation for course podcasting and blogging, here are a few resources hosted by the Digital Media Center.

Digital Media Center, Copyright and Podcasting FAQ

Creative Commons, Podcasting Legal Guide: Rules for the Revolution.

Eric Faden, A Fair(y) Use Tale: A Disney Review of Copyright, 2007.

Larry Lessig, How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law, TED Talks, 2007.