 I was attending the last lightning talk when we heard from a developer, we're hearing from a lot of developers today, heard from a graphic designer, both very interesting presentations. I'm coming at this from somewhat of a different perspective. As a librarian, I support a system at the University of Pennsylvania called Canvas. So my role is sort of in educational technology. I use WordPress in my day-to-day job to blog about this system and the various things that are going on with it, everything from updates to the system to support issues to programming for my department. So while I love doing this, I also have to admit that it's not the most interesting topic sometimes. There are 17 Penn Libraries blogs, so I'm one of those 17, and my colleagues post some really interesting things. For example, I saw a recent blog post from our medieval manuscripts blog, and it was a really interesting illustration from the 15th century, so Renaissance manuscript, as of an illustration of St. Francis of Assisty and his Stigmatic Hands. I don't get to do things like that, but I hope that what you'll see from this talk is I do get to do some interesting things, particularly in regard to persuading folks who are unhappy to more or less manage the unhappiness and to trust us in the service we provide. So in order to do that, I'm going to work through a scenario that's probably very familiar to a lot of you if you've ever done support or worked in public service or even retail at some point in your lives. So stop me if you think you've heard this one before. So you are, in this scenario, a support person for a company or for an organization, and you get a call or an email from an angry user. They have enough computer skills to do their job, but they're not really proficient in troubleshooting, nor do they really have the vocabulary to best explain the situation to you. So the issue kind of escalates, and the user gets upset. They get upset because they feel that their needs aren't being met or they're frustrated by the language barrier or the vocabulary barrier, and then you're placed in a position where you need to decide how to essentially close the interaction such that the user isn't angry and hopefully that you actually help them. So in this situation, the question to ask is, well, what to do? They're upset. Well, if we hide from the question or try tackling it with insufficient information, it's likely that we'll have a frustrated user on our hands. And also, it will be unclear if we've actually helped the user. They might write an angry email indicating that they haven't helped, but there might be a situation where they just don't respond. They just kind of cut off contact from you and your service, and that might be the last time you hear from them, which if you're in a role like librarianship, you don't want, you want to encourage patrons to return. So what do you do? Well, my answer to this question is two words, Wim Hof. So this is Wim Hof, and he holds 20 world records for his ability to endure extreme cold. These, he attributes these successes to his ability to control his body's temperature, sorry, through mental training and breathing exercises. He's applied this method in scientific experiments in which doctors exposed him to illness, and he's been able to resist those being susceptible to those illnesses through these techniques. So the results of these experiments seem to verify that Wim can fend off illness by mentally controlling his autonomic nervous system and immune system. So the reason why I'm mentioning Wim Hof is because I feel that his story is analogous to what my colleagues and I realized about our ability to solve this type of communication problem, which I know isn't just unique to the service that I provide, but unique to anyone who is in business or is part of an organization where there's a public service aspect. So although it seemed like we were powerless to control the terms of the conversation, we kind of discovered amongst ourselves that we could organically, through a WordPress site, address our user's needs and support them as best as possible. So I am a part of a team of three. It's another librarian who's my supervisor and a recently hired instructional designer, so we're a very small group. And the service we provide, which is courseware support, meaning that we support a system that is used at the university for the administration of courses, so it's like the online component to courses. Usually that type of service is associated with an IT department or some sort of central computing department. At Penn, it's in the libraries. So that puts us in a really unique position to be sort of disinterested between communicators between parties in a way, because we can talk to our IT folks and get them to give us some answers, and then we can talk to the user and help them, too. So we're kind of like the mediators, so to speak. And one of the ways we've pursued this mediation is through our WordPress blog. And so with a little care and love, it started to thrive and grow into an integral part of our communication network and strategy. And so this network includes 26 IT and support professionals, educational support professionals, and ten schools at the University of Pennsylvania that support over 2,400 courses that contain anywhere from one to hundreds of students, not to mention the faculty, TAs, graders, lab assistants, et cetera. It amounts to about 25,000 students and about 6,000 instructors. So a lot of people to support, and a lot of people to upset or inconvenience if you're not helping them as best as possible. And one of the things that we discovered is that a lot of our users were basically searching the darkness of Google for answers to questions that were very idiosyncratic to our situation at Penn. And the idiosyncrasy of this situation was that in 2013, we were migrating from one learning management system, which is called Blackboard, to this other one, which is called Canvas. If you've been in college or grad school at all in the past decade or so, you're probably used to Blackboard. I'm surprised I'm not hearing more groans. It's not a very popular system. And this company, Canvas, is really starting to take the world by storm, the education world by storm, and do some good work. And Penn uses it and has had much success with it. So the Canvas at Penn blog was started in 2013. Here's a still of it. And was born of the need to share timely, accurate information from this migration from Blackboard to Canvas. And that process was, I would say, as challenging a PR move as it was a technical one. And since it's inception, the blog has become a sort of de facto canonical source for all things Canvas at Penn. The vendor and structure, the makers of Canvas, have their own really great documentation, as do a bunch of other schools and universities. However, because of the uniqueness of our situation, we needed to come up with a place to have our own very specific information. And the WordPress blog was a great way to do that. So I owe the success of this sort of role that Canvas at Penn enjoys to certain features of the blogging genre in general, and of WordPress in particular. And I'd like to share a few of those now. First, as you all are familiar, blogs let you share current information. And in our case, we always needed to share current information with users. And this is no small feat. Canvas changes a lot every three weeks. Plus there are the numerous new functions, requests, bugs that we see that users report to us. And we've also found that having this blog lets us sort of dispel any rumors or correct any misinformation that might be floating around. As you can imagine, students talk, professors talk, and sometimes they talk about what's not working. And so if there is sort of a conversation on campus about something going wrong with Canvas, or something they perceive is going wrong with Canvas, what winds up happening is it has a sort of a telephone effect. If you've ever played the game telephone, you can get distorted. The blog has served us really well in sort of correcting that kind of distortion in a very quick and easy fashion. So another great aspect of this blog on WordPress is that it's, as you all know, it's very easy to use. We've heard from developers. We've heard from designers. A lot of the folks that I work with aren't either of those things. Some of them are, but most of them are people who are using WordPress for very sort of basic, but ultimately very important kinds of work. So being able to customize this site, specifically the navigation menu and the pages feature, really was great when we were starting to move from the kind of nebulous, uncertain realm of the migration into the more concrete and stable world of post-Blackboard pen. So this was an excellent feature of the blog. Now, another thing that this blog is great for is pushing out information to users whenever there is maintenance or an unanticipated outage. What's great is obviously that WordPress is in no way connected to our Canvas. So if the system is down and we need to reach users if they subscribe to this blog and also subscribe to our Twitter, they get this information very easily. So one final thing I want to mention is that we also support pilots for our users. So for different LTIs that users want to put into their Canvas sites, we encourage them to try them out and we advertise these on the blog and we also make documentation as a result of it and post it to the blog too. So those were just a few of the probably innumerable uses of Canvas, or sorry, for WordPress, for sharing important information with users when you support. So I would argue that if this is adopted by your organization using WordPress in this kind of way, these kinds of blogging practices will ideally have a cumulative effect of stopping your need to constantly put out fires, which is where we found ourselves. And some of these fires really do seem like the end of the world to users. I mean, you might have a very good understanding of how things are and how to fix them quickly, but a lot of people depend on various types of systems and applications to do their jobs. So when things aren't working, it's pretty dire to them. So you might even find that users start participating more in the conversation about the service that you provide and actually view it as an educational experience as opposed to an obligation. This is something that we've started to see recently, and I owe a lot of that to the Canvas at Pen blog. But even if those changes don't happen, you can be assured that your users will appreciate the work that you've put into it, and hopefully we'll think of you in a new light. So that's it. Thank you.