World of Wall – pretty much open

One of my many projects which keeps me from doing cooler things like the 7 things meme has been the World of Wall, a site that is going to integrate all the online information I need for my classes. I’ve blogged about this project but I think it is operational enough now that I can say it is open for business. Right now I’ll be using it for my Computer Networking 10 class as we finish up the semester. Once the second semester starts on January 28, I’ll be using it for all my face to face classes (Computer Networking 20 and 30, and Biology 20) and maybe even for sharing some of the work I’ve been doing in my online classes (Computer Science 20 and 30).

The site consists of a WordPress blog which is the primary public interface for the site. The blog will be used for posting questions, assignments and notices for students. This is something I did with my Computer Networking classes back around 2003 (long since lost in the shifting sands of the world wide web) and it worked pretty successfully. There is also a wiki associated with the site where I can keep notes and assignments. The wiki content is being seamlessly integrated into the blog using the wiki-inc plugin – thanks again to D’Arcy for his screencast that made me think about that integration and answering my questions about the implementation.

Where to next? I’d like to be able to divide out the different courses so students can navigate simply and easily to the content for the course they are in instead of looking at information for all courses. This could be done by putting a list of categories in the sidebar, but I’m sure there must be a more elegant solution. I’m also pondering if my student created content will be part of my installed wiki or if I’ll use wikispaces for hosting student work, a topic I’ve previously blogged about. I’m not sure if I want to spend a lot of time managing wiki content to deal with spamtards so right now I’m leaning in the direction of using wikispaces.

If you have any ideas or comments about where I could take this project next or improvements that could be made, I’d appreciate your input. I’ll keep updating about how the site is put together as it is developed for anyone who is interested in creating a similar site.