February 7, 2019 — This talk describes an ongoing developmental project for building a bespoke theme for a faculty. It includes the description of project requirements, the planning stages, and the actual development. It highlights the uniqueness of building a theme for an academic setup, and shares some of the difficulties in managing projects amidst other workloads.

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December 10, 2018 — Ce que j’ai appris en travaillant en remote grâce à WordPress et sa communauté et comment l’a t’on appliqué pour enseigner à l’université
Ça c’est une histoire d’amour. Il s’agit de comment je suis tombé amoureux du travail en remote et la communauté WordPress tandis que je faisais de la recherche pour trouver des meilleures façons pour véhiculer l’apprentissage à travers l’Internet. J’ai du tout simplement cloner à l’université la structure de communication et apprentissage. Peux-tu imaginer quand tu étais étudiant d’avoir fait partie d’une communauté d’apprentissage enthousiaste qu’on trouve sur des forums, blogs, et slack au lieu de… bon… de ce que nous avons eu ? Le schéma de la communauté WordPress a été appliqué la première fois en Éducation Formel (UNED) en 2015-16 dans un programme de master et doctorat adressé aux professeurs. On a créé une structure de discussion horizontal sur Slack et Forums/logs dans lequel le prof et les étudiants on appris de la même façon que les intégrants de la communauté WordPress le fait. Les résultats ont été depuis cette première fois extraordinaires. 97% des élèves ont assuré qu’ils voulaient répéter le schéma en tant que professeurs parmi des autres résultats également prometteurs.

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August 15, 2017 — WordPress in Higher Education

August 15, 2017 — Dawson College, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada with 10,000+ students and 1,000+ faculty and staff has adopted WordPress as our primary web publishing platform. We’ve mostly had success, but we’ve also had our share of failures and growing pains. In this case study, I’m going to talk about how we started out with WordPress in 2010, migrated our main website a few years later to a multi-site install and how it all evolved to what we have today. Since then, we’ve adopted the “lean and mean” mantra to building sites, while making them easy to update. This case study will showcase the front and back-ends of our higher profile sites to show how we achieved our goals. We’ll also explain how we manage expectations, do our development, choose plugins and tools, and which themes we’ve come to rely on.

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April 3, 2017 — I’ll briefly discuss how things got started from a single testing site and progressed to the current single and multisite WordPress deployment used today. I’ll outline the reasoning, history, and evolution that has lead our team to focus on using WordPress in a collaborative environment to meet the needs of our multifaceted audience. Some parts also include leadership “buy-in”, training, support, and continual maintenance. I plan to allow plenty of time for questions.

March 18, 2017 — The web created the first universal publishing platform but schools, of all levels, are still having students submit paper or “electronic documents” for grading and review. Academic work lives in private, closed systems, never exposing students to the opportunity of external feedback.

This session will propose a different approach. We require incoming college freshmen to become publishers during their first few weeks in school. They create websites and use that publishing platform to post personal reflections, current event updates … and all of their assignments. The website becomes a repository for what will be a portfolio of assignments by the time a student graduates.

Our approach could work for any discipline, but it will take a change of mindset and the acquisition of new skills and infrastructure. It’s time to change the culture of education by creating college graduates that are media literate, proficient web publishers and good digital citizens.

March 16, 2017 — So-called digital natives might pick up tech skills easily, but that doesn’t mean they intuit everything tech-related – there is plenty to teach and learn, especially when it comes to a robust storytelling tool like WordPress. Teaching high school students how to properly design, set up, and launch a WordPress blog and how to tell their stories powerfully to a target audience, with good writing and high-quality multimedia, gives them a mighty perch from which to sing. I’ll explain the step-by-step process I’ve used to teach teens to become WordPress bloggers.

December 11, 2016 — Learn how Newark Public Schools (NJ’s largest school district 40,000 students; 70 schools) cut their annual web site technology budget in half by migrating to WordPress from a closed-source, proprietary, expensive, vendor-controlled SaaS CMS.

Hear stories from the trenches about budget battles, angry/clueless technology vendors and frustrated administrators from one guy with a vision to disrupt the market and bring better web site technology to our public schools using a WordPress-Powered SaaS called SchoolPress.

Case studies will be presented for three districts (2 in NJ, 1 in TX) that migrated to WordPress.

December 8, 2016 — Dawson College with 10,000+ students and 1,000+ faculty and staff has adopted WordPress as our primary web publishing platform. We’ve mostly had success, but we’ve also had our share of failures and growing pains. In this case study, I’m going to talk about how we started out with WordPress in 2010, migrated our main website a few years later to a multi-site install and how it all evolved to what we have today. Since then, we’ve adopted the “lean and mean” mantra to building sites, while making them easy to update. This case study will showcase the front and back-ends of our higher profile sites to show how we achieved our goals. We’ll also explain how we manage expectations, do our development, choose plugins and tools, and which themes we’ve come to rely on.

Presentation Slides »

November 20, 2016 — In her talk, Rose will discuss the impact of open source technology, content management systems, the dynamic nature of WordPress and how her students impressions of WordPress change over time.

In addition to her educational efforts, Rose spends her free time volunteering with dog rescue organizations and spending time with her family.