On Campus

1. The Wonderful World of Wordpress Presented by Danielle DeStaso, Sarah Dougherty & Rebecca Livi For Entrepreneurs On Campus What is Wordpress? Wordpressis an open-source web application, that has essentially made it easier than ever for experienced and novice writers alike to publish content. It is intriguing to note that the original and main purpose of Wordpress is to serve as a blogging platform; however, it has expanded and can be adapted to be a web development platform. Wordpress boasts a user number of 50 million, and is utilized by the field of education, mainly by colleges and universities.  In this realm, faculty and students of colleges and universities can publish and share content in the form of portfolios, news sites, departmental newsletters and alumni magazines. Wordpress gains its immense popularity from the fact that it so simple to use and does not require much technological skill. This fact has opened a whole new facet of use for the website, as a learning tool in the field of higher education. There are also websites that can help entrepreneurs choose the best porfolio to advertise their work. One useful website it called “makeuseof.com” and it lists the top 40 most useful portfolios that Wordpress has to offer  (Best WordPress Plugins). It is obvious that WordPress is used be a lot of people who are looking to make their content known and people who are looking for new ideas. A visit to delicious.com will prove just how many people are using WordPress and advertising all of the different ways to use it as well as the best ways for your conent. The increasing popularity of WordPress on college campuses can only be a good thing for aspiring writers but entrepreneurs as well. They can present their ideas in an easily accessible and comprehensive module. The article states that WordPress is a “springboard for students to launch their ideas and their written reflections into the wider community” (7 Things you should know about WordPress, 2011). It cannot be stressed enough how easy WordPress makes it for work to be read by a wide variety of people in a professional system. Where is it Going? When using WordPress in the future there is going to be so much more you can do with it. Conversations will be able to be held over pieces of work, so when you upload something peers can have conversations with you about it and make correction if needed. It can be used as a place to upload work before it becomes something bigger and possibly published. Writers will be able to use this frequently as their own blog to receive feedback and even corrections to see where their work stands with an audience. WordPress will also become mobile on smartphones such as the iPhone. When it becomes mobile all your work and blogging becomes easily accessible at all times. In the Classroom WordPresscan be used just in class to upload assignments but it can also be used to upload your work to the public for people to see and comment on. When students reach college they enter a world of trying to find a job and creating resumes. When you use WordPressfor classes in college or even just for your personal use you open up your options of getting a job opportunity because companies or managements may look at the work that has been uploaded. Social Networking IT staff can install a local instance of WordPress with the multisite feature enabled, which will then make individual WordPress accounts available to the entire campus community. This will allow users to enter content viewable either privately or on the entire web. Additionally, WordPress is installed with the BuddyPress plugin, which can turn any group, such as a college campus, into a social network, including a friend system and discussion forums.