Open Scholarship

This is a quick post about this website and how I hope it will now work. It started off very clunky and did not work the way I planned. This was partially due to some unexpected limitations in WordPress. I am keeping my fingers crossed that recent changes will improve interaction.

The primary goal of the website is to provide a way to interact outside of our monthly meetings and to “open up” the conversation.

The main page is set up to show the  interactive elements, the blog posts and the #openberg twitter feed. When a participant submits a blog post, it appears on the Home page. Others can then see it and, if they so desire, comment on the post. Posts are syndicated (using WPeMatico), but at the moment this is only active for Chip Gruen’s site- the posts on his website using the appropriate category will also appear here. Reactions are limited to comments.

Additionally, any tweet posted with the hashtag, “#openberg” will appear in the twitter feed. Participants can react to the tweets if they so desire. This is not ideal, hashtags cannot be “followed” directly within Twitter. They can be followed with tweetdeck, but this is a browser based tool and therefore useful primarily on computers. There is no tweetdeck app. Alternatively, participants can follow each other, so that their posts will appear in the feeds of their followers. This is also a bit clunky. Alternatively, I could have created a twitter account for the FLC (perhaps @openberg). Though this could then be directly followed, it would need to be maintained into the future. I was not really willing to claim that responsibility. The hashtag exists on its own, no maintenance needed.

Although there are ways to interact built into these blogs and twitter and I hope people will use them, I also expect that people will comment in our face-to-face sessions.

On the right of the Home page are participants names and links to the various ways that they indicated that they would like to interact. Some of these include multiple methods (and therefore links), others just one. Those who indicated that they would like to primarily use the blog, are linked directly to their contributions, using the following format (https://open.flc.bergbuilds.domains/author/replacewithauthorsname/).

In the end, I am honestly getting more and more frustrated by the limitations of WordPress. The essential problem is that you really need to know everything that you want to do prior to choosing a WordPress theme. Themes, while very user-friendly- as long as you chose the “right” one- can also be very limiting. For example, the theme we chose could not have the most recent blog posts on the Home page AND the twitter feed and participants list. We did not know this prior to choosing the theme and had to get outside help to fix it. This means that changing and adjusting can be particularly difficult. And, yet, as far as I know, there isn’t necessarily an easier and more flexible way than WordPress.