Migrating a SharePoint blog to Hosted WordPress

I needed to migrate a SharePoint blog to hosted WordPress (this blog, category RKChronicle), and after a bit of searching assembled this solution: SharePoint to Excel, Excel to CSV file, CSV imported to WP (3rd party host), WP export to WP (hosted) import.

Recipe

SharePoint to MSExcel. Using Internet Explorer under Windows, in the SharePoint blog, use View All Site Content to access the Posts (a SharePoint list).

Create a SP List View for export. The importer expects these column headings, you can make your view align (mostly) with what it expects. The view I created (using SP naming) was:

Title, Body, Category, Created, Created By

When viewing the list use the Actions dropdown to Export to Excel. Save the resulting file.

MSExcel to CSV. The importer I found requires Comma Separated Values, so open the file created above in Excel and “save as” into CSV format.

Import CSV to WP. I found the CSV Importer ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/csv-importer/other_notes/ ) by Hagerty, Pedro & Loeffler. (You can not install the plugin to the free version of WP hosted at WordPress.com  I used a 3rd party hosted version of WP to install the plugin.)

The importer is smart, you can omit columns and it will set default values. SharePoint didn’t have some of the data the importer expected, so I omitted Post_type, post_excerpt, post_tags, and post_slug. I renamed the column headings from the Excel export (step above).

The default columns expected by the importer and the ones I used (bold).

csv_post_title
csv_post_post
csv_post_type
csv_post_excerpt
csv_post_categories
csv_post_tags
csv_post_date
csv_post_author
csv_post_slug

I set the option “import posts as draft” so I could work with them privately. When the import worked, it worked quickly. When it didn’t it gave no useful error messages. I found that I needed to be very careful with the CSV file (first couple times I edited it on a Macintosh and that seemed to make it not work). There is a sample file. Play with it until you get your tool set right.

Export from 3rd party WP and import into Hosted-WP. This was simple, 163 posts in 25 seconds. (Look under the Tools menu.)

Notes
The free hosted WP does not allow you to install plug ins, so I needed to work via a 3rd party installation of WP, ver 3.0.2

I tried going via RSS, but was unable to see how to get a SharePoint blog RSS feed that contained the bodies (as opposed to linking them). WP wants to import an XML file not a feed and I could not find a way to get the necessary file from a SP feed.

I mapped SharePoint Categories to WP tags for my own reasons.

If you touch the CSV file by opening and saving using Excel for Macintosh, you will screw it up somehow. All work must be done on the PC.

I found that I needed to convert some characters in the CSV file. I think SP must have used unicode for smart quotes and for carriage-return. I did a bulk replace on the CSV file to deal with most of the issues.

The process did not move attachments and images. I did this by hand and also made minor clean up to the posts.

Biggest annoyance. The process brought over the date posted but when I convert the drafts to published, the date is changed to the current date. Were I doing this again, I’d consider importing in published format (not draft) into an obscure instance of WP, do the editing, then export to the production WP.

How a rubric can communicate

OAI has been finishing up its 2009-10 cycle of reviews of program-level assessment, see the University’s portfolio for details about the process and the results.

One of the responses to a program regarding communication with stakeholders had a summary of the utility of a rubric as a communication tool:

Under “Communication” the report states: “Program Objectives and Outcomes will be more extensively discussed with the students in classes to encourage more participation in the assessment and improvement process.”

A programmatic assessment rubric could be a very useful tool to encourage students, and other stakeholders, to participate in the assessment and improvement process. For example a rubric:

• Provides a reference point for students to consult repeatedly as they monitor their own learning and develop the skills of self-assessment. Students are supported in becoming better judges of quality in their own and others’ work.
• Supports the development of a sense of shared expectations among students, faculty, staff, and external stakeholders.
• Provides evaluators and those whose work is being evaluated with rich and detailed descriptions of what is being learned and what is not by facilitating a breaking down of outcomes into dimensions and of dimensions into criteria.
• Provides criteria to shape and guide students’ engagement with one another and with course content.
• Promotes a shared understanding among faculty, students, and stakeholders of the program outcomes.

Chart of raw scores on 3 related engineering assessment reports, Fall 2010

Re: chart of raw scores on 3 related engineering assessment reports, Fall 2010

Kimberly,
Thanks for making this graph, its a helpful visualization of the raters’ differences. You, Jayme and I have confirmed that the three reports are substantially identical. The other observation you made the other day was that Raters 1 & 2 were together on one program which has led to that program having a different rating from the other two programs.

I re-made your chart, adding a solid black line for the average of 6 ratings (as if all raters read one report, which in effect they did). I added two dashed black lines at 1/2 point above and below the average. Points between the dashed lines are ratings within 1/2 point agreement of the average.

I see 3 blue, 1 red and 1 orange rating that are outside the 1/2 point agreement band.

One conversation could be about the quality of our internal norming (this was an inadvertent test of that).

More pressing now perhaps is how we represent this data back to the college and programs involved.

Gary & I chatted about my first graph and so I removed Rater 1, the most significant outlier and re-made the chart. In this 2nd chart, only one rating of 20 is outside the 1/2 point tolerance now. I conclude we should update Process Actions with the average scores for all 3 programs. The resulting averages of 5 raters are:

Dim 1:2.40
Dim 2:2.70
Dim 3:2.00
Dim 4:2.10

On 11/8/10 2:18 PM, “Kimberly Green” wrote:

Regards,

Kimberly

Kimberly Green
Educational Designer / Assessment Specialist
Office of Assessment and Innovation
Washington State University
Pullman, Washington
(509) 335-5675
kimberly_green@wsu.edu

As you enter a classroom ask yourself this question: If there were no students in the room, could I do what I’m planning to do?  If your answer is yes, don’t do it.     -Ruben Cubero

Analysis of Inter-rater agreement 2009-10

Lee,

Thanks for telling me that you completed rating Honors also.

Our average ratings for that program were 5; 5.5; 4.5; 5  so we are a little lower than you, but in the same category “Integrating” in all but one.

You can see all our results here: https://universityportfolio.wsu.edu/2009-2010/Pages/default.aspx

We are exploring two measures of inter-rater reliability, within 1 point and within the same category.

In terms of scores, see the graph, which we think is good. 83% of our scores are within 1 point of each other

Regarding being in the same category, we are not doing as well, it seems that we often come close, but straddle the lines.

What is valuable about you rating 2 programs (one high and one low) is that we can begin to get a sense that you see our measure in the same way that we do.  Another kind of test we need to do is see if outsiders agree with us in the messy middle.

We have more work like this to do with external stakeholders to see how well our tool plays in the wider arenas

Nils

On 10/13/10 4:40 PM, “Lee” wrote:

> Hi Nils,
>
> I sent in my review of Honors.  I gave them all top marks.  Was I right?  They
> struck me as being the Bar we’re all trying to reach!  It’s almost like you
> wrote the review rubric to FIT what they’ve done!?
>
> Lee
> ________________________________
> From: Nils Peterson [nils_peterson@wsu.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 3:47 PM
> To: Lee
> Subject: Another WSU program to review
>
> Lee,
>
> Rather than Business, I’m giving you our Honors program. This is a program
> that has worked with our unit for several years and we know them.
>
> I think you will find it contrasts from Biology’s report in ways that may help
> you exercise more of the rubric’s scale.
>
> Thanks for your interest and help

P2PU Assessment Workshop

Philipp Schmidt of P2PU was attending the HASTAC P3 meeting last week. He’s hosting a meeting (P2PU Assessment Workshop) next week at Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Palo Alto. CA.  The meeting’s agenda is evolving in the wiki in the link above.  Theron DesRosier will be attending with me.

I have one key question about this meeting, regarding the assumptions and goals of the organizers: Are we trying to enable learning and learners or are we trying to build a university? (Theron and I are hoping for the former.)

Which makes me think of Terry Wassell interesting thought in response to a discussion in Dave Cormier’s blog post “An emerging model for open courses” :

@Scott Leslie. Thanks for your comment on the language of ‘courses’, or in my case ‘modules’. It has helped me realise that my approach to open education post my looming retirement may be trapped in the wrong mindset. I have been trying to think of how I can convert a module I teach at Leeds Uni that dies when I retire to an OE resource ‘in the wild’. I have been thinking about how it can be packaged as an OE module that a community of network of open learners can engage with and exploit/re-purpose according to individual and collective needs. I assumed that I and others would somehow organically become mentors (open tutors?) and flexibly help out as required. Perhaps I should be trying to develop links with existing communities engages in discussions and project around the discipline of my module and try and contribute there somehow. I think your comment illustrates the difficult transition in moving between open education as content (based on a formal education model) and open education as process that engages disparate audiences with varied agendas and objectives. [emphasis added]

Another perspective related to this discussion can be found in Stephen Downes’ 2007 post “Open Source Assessment.”   To Stephen’s thinking, I would add the thought that the assessment needs to be conducted in public (in contrast to a typical university process where student assessment is private between student and teacher). Think instead of the example of a master class in violin, where multiple learners are observing the dialog between teacher and student.

The important aspect of conducting the assessment in public, using public criteria, is that the community can learn from the experience as ‘legitimate peripheral participants.’

So, returning to Terry’s question, I’m wondering if Terry can create an open assessment of the learning in his modules. Terry might then post his content and the assessment where it can be accessed by the community.

Information Abundance

As we continue to collaborate to prepare for the HASTAC P3 event, Kim has asked me a couple more questions

Kim: What do you believe are the challenges and barriers entry scholars will have to navigate as they attempt to make a lifelong career in the Academy?

In a 2007 conversation with Dennis Haarsager, Interim CEO of National Public Radio, he described the Internet as “‘anti-scarcity’, it’s about information abundance. The way to obtain value is not in controlling a scarce resource, the value is to be had in the ability to extract value from the mass of information, by organizing it, filtering it, ‘chunking’ it” What he called an ‘information [organization] theory of value.’

I believe that the shift from information scarcity to information abundance, and from scarcity of feedback from a community of practice to abundance of  feedback alters the dynamic of the university as an institution and the role of the new scholar seeking to make a career there. The “Academy” is a concept from a time of information scarcity that needs to adapt itself to the world of information abundance.

In a previous blog post we discussed connected these scarcity/abundance ideas related to learners working in public spaces and said that in “order to gain any learning value from working in public, the learner must participate in collaborative efforts to extract (or make) value from the information richness of the Internet. This kind of strategy has been called Learning 2.0 by Stephen Downes, who has created this diagram to describe differences between groups and networks as organizational strategies for learning (original sketch midway down this post).

Group (Learning 1.0)	Network (Learning 2.0)
Groups require unity	Networks require diversity
Groups require coherence	Networks require autonomy
Groups require privacy or segregation	Networks require openness
Groups require focus of voice	Networks require interaction

So the new scholar needs to understand new norms and practices related to information abundance. One of these, I think, is teaching in public, with a community involved in giving feedback to learners. Cathy Davidson has explored one aspect of public teaching, “crowdsourcing grading” here and here.

The HASTAC P3 event will be a place to further explore the implications of crowd sourcing feedback and how to use that feedback to credential learning in a community.

My arm's almost better

I went to the Doc yesterday with the hope of being freed of my post-op restrictions and to discuss my various arm pains. Good News: He says: “You may do anything you can do.” (Note the careful grammar). I think we both know that I can do less than I want to do, so off to strength training. I see the PT Monday.

Cautionary News: There is a cyst the size of a pea inside the ball, under the area where the rotator cuff work was done. This may go away as the joint gets more load, or it may require a bone graft to fill the void. Right now its internal to the bone, but we took Xrays and I go back in mid-November (3 mo) to see how its progressing. [Late note: Xray was “good.”]

Regarding popping: 30% of people experience this. Its not the surgery, its age related.

Regarding pain in right bicep and shoulder: That is rotator cuff disease. Doc  recommends going as long as I can before treating it. (You bet, given what treating it in the other arm just cost!)

Regarding pain in the left side: Doc shrugs. I’m pleased with your repair. The Gritman Radiologist reports that he doesn’t see anything there (ie, can’t tell it was damaged or repaired). These things take a year to heal.

An invitation to shape my presentation at P3

I am going to be participating in a one day event Peer-to-Peer Pedagogies (P3) Workshop September 10th, 2010 sponsored by HASTAC on the Duke campus.  As part of that, I’ve been assigned to work with Kim Singletary on a bio/ speaker intro piece.

The event was great fun. Thanks to all. Here is the SlideShare from my talk. Coming back on the plane I remembered this piece by Downes on Open Assessment that seems as timely as ever.

This post is an invitation to collaborate with the two of us as we co-develop the materials that Kim will ultimately push into final form. At the same time, I see my dialog with Kim as sharpening my focus for the event. Please weigh in using this blog’s comments. I will continue to edit the body of the post based on your remarks, and any backchannel with Kim, or other readers.

After reviewing some of our blog (written with colleagues of mine at Washington State University) Kim sent a list of questions to get the discussion going. Here is the first of those questions.

Kim: What do you hope will be accomplished at P3? What is your goal for your appearance at the conference?

Nils: I feel like the open learning, peer pedagogy landscape is loosely defined and rapidly changing and I hope to come away with some ideas about where the clusters of agreement lie in this terrain. Brian Lamb and Jim Groom just wrote a piece in Educause Review “Never Mind the Edupunks; or, The Great Web 2.0 Swindle” July/Aug 2010 where they are suggesting that the open learning wave may have crested. They provide an interesting perspective on the shoals that may have dashed the vision.

In the same issue Dave Cormier and George Siemens had a piece on their experiments with open online courses, “Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement”   See also some response in Dave’s blog.

My colleagues and I at Washington State University Office of Assessment and Innovation have been approaching this conversation with an eye to two contexts:

1. The need to expand higher learning opportunities in the developing world is so large that it challenges historic thinking about brick and mortar institutions. John Seely Brown, Don Tappscott and others are talking about this challenge. Some of our analysis of this context is here.
2. The other context (given our assessment/accountability role at WSU) is the increasing press for accountability and the rising volume in the discussion at national levels about the failures of US higher education to be accountable for its students’ learning outcomes. See this stream of bookmarks on the topic maintained by Gary Brown.

In that context, we’ve been looking at how Personal Learning Environments, or student-owned ePortfolios, can facilitate learning among communities (including peers) and how the learning in those contexts can be credentialed.  A condensation of some of that thinking appears in our discussion of our emerging understanding of an ePortfolio.

We have been developing those ideas, in part, by watching the peer learning and collaborative problem solving of one of WSU’s doctoral students, Margo Tamez.
She blogs:

I would advise anyone who is seriously committed to the larger structural uses of E-portfolios by contemporary students– who by the way do not view the college classroom as their most significant ‘center’ of knowledge and tool acquisition, (providing one is inclined to view the technology and control over the production as the domain of liberatory education)–,to examine their assumptions about knowledge and power and the political will of the Indigenous peoples.

So, one of the things I hope to get from the P3 conversation is more personal clarity on the ideas in this “4 models” figure that we created to think about the changing roles of the university as it moves from traditional brick and mortar, with traditional accountability, to a problem-based curriculum in peer-to-peer university with community-based accountability and credentialing. Along with the four models figure, we created a self-assessment to help clarify the conversation about where each of us in on an institution- vs community-based learning spectrum.

As Margo’s portfolio illustrates, open peer-to-peer learning is necessarily scattered widely across the Internet. Pulling that evidence together for assessment and credentialing is a challenge. Gary Brown coined the term “Harvesting Gradebook” to describe our approach to the problem of allowing learners to gather structured feedback on artifacts of their learning and to route evidence of that feedback back to a ‘home’ institution or to present that feedback as part of a claim within a community for a credential. An early description of the Harvesting Gradebook and how it might work in/out/with a university program appear here (skim down for “Variations in the Model” section).

In my P3 session I hope to introduce some of our Harvesting Gradebook thinking in a large scale real-time experiment using a backchannel where the audience can provide assessment feedback to my presentation.

Shared Language-Jargon Dilemma

Our University-hosed wiki is about to be retired. This page, developed in Sept-Oct 2005 seemed work keeping. I’ve ported it here changing links to preserve the navigation. – np

Shared language

Most academic disciplines and other discourse communities develop context specific language. They use such specialized language to communicate complex ideas efficiently among members of the group. EE Kim uses the term SharedLangage to describe this concept of communication.

Jargon

Unfortunately, what is effective and efficient for established members of disciplines and discourse communities presents extreme challenges for students, novices and outsiders. Since students have not yet mastered the shared language, they may experience the shared language as jargon impeding their entry into the discipline.

E.E. Kim: Wikis resolve the dilemma

Kim suggests that the discourse communities can resolve the tension between jargon and shared language by using wikis to make the shared language more explicit: [[1]] Kim argues that wikis support the development of shared language in ways that Content Mangement Systems and standard websites do not. He urges writers to use automatic WikiWord linking to identify shared language and explain it.

Using Wiki to Develop Communities

Our University-hosed wiki is about to be retired. This page, developed in Sept-Oct 2005 seemed work keeping. I’ve ported it here changing links to preserve the navigation. – np

The (perhaps not obvious) way to find community in MediaWiki installations (and some others) is to use the history page to see who is contributing to the article. The page provides a portfolio of the work of an ad hoc team collaborating around a topic area. Examination of the history page would show not only who contributed, but the character of their contribution. From this, one might glean ideas about how knowledgeable contributors were to the topic. By then exploring other pages edit by these people (Special:Contributions&target=user) one could learn more about the scope and character of these individuals.

In WSUWiki, there are additional, more explicit mechansims to enable users to find one another. The best developed of these is CTLT’s Morning Reading Group (MRG). Using a Category page, MRG is building pages to capture the group’s thinking about articles that are read bi-weekly. Rather than the process above where interest in a topic is inferred by edits shown on the History page, MRG members are encouraged to edit their user page to include a Category tag (for example see User:Nils peterson.

To facilitate these group-forming activities, two templates have been created, one for the Groups’ page, describing it and inviting others to join, and the other for a User’s page, declaring and describing reasons for interest in the group.

Categories in MediaWiki are essential to the operation of this system. As MRG members create or find pages of interest to the group, they tag the pages with the MRG category. This causes the pages to list in the index of the MRG page).

Student-Faculty Interaction

Another application of this strategy of users adding themselves to category pages can be seen in the work developing to faciliate more faculty-student interaction. The concept started out being called ‘Undergraduate Research,’ but came to be understood as something more general, presently its working name is Matchmaking.

The objective is to help faculty advertise ways in which they would like to interact with students in scholarship activities, and for students to find faculty (and perhaps groups of students and faculty) with shared interests and experiences. The only example implemented as of this writing is by Nils Peterson.

Other campuses have undertaken similar initiatives, using custom database solutions. WSU is exploring Wiki as its solution for two reasons:

• Its more ad hoc, and can support data and structures that might be invented later more readily than a traditional database solution.
• Wiki can support other group formation (in addition to Matchmaking) using the same mechanisms, allowing users to invent other purposes and groups without requiring new tools.

---

See also:
Using_Wikis_For_Learning and especially

• Students Contribute to Wikipedia
• Wiki as a Portfolio