My team has been developing a collection of WordPress plugins for creating what we are calling “connection hub” sites.  These are sites that aggregate content from hundreds of faculty profile sites and then organize these connected sites by discipline and research interests.

D3 Word Cloud Widget

The word clouds on the home pages of our connection sites uses a WordPress plugin we are developing for creating customizable word clouds similar to Wordle. While Wordle uses Java, we have created similar functionality by means of the D3 Javascript library, based on the work by Jason Davies. See: D3 Word Cloud PluginRead more…

Faculty in the Physics and Optical Science department have created hundreds of instructional screencasts that are used in introductory physics courses and in courses on physics for science and engineering.

Initially these videos were shared with students in QuickTime format as downloads from static html websites.  These videos have since been moved to Vimeo and YouTube and linked to from WordPress sites:

• Phys1101 – Introductory Physics 1
• Physics for Science & Engineering II

Read more…

The OAT is working on creating a site for publishing information about labs, see:
http://pages.uncc.edu/labs/

We programmatically created posts for each lab with basic information using the CSV Importer plugin.  We used categories and tags to organize the lab information.  Crystal Barton updated the Translucence theme to use custom categories and tag labels from the custom tag and category base name specified in the site settings (see: Custom Categories and Tags Labels).  This enabled us to rename “categories” to “specifications” and “tags” to “software.”

Each lab post was categorized according to building, department, operating system and number of seats.  Each lab post was tagged with a list of all the software available on its each of its workstations.Read more…