eduglu
I had a discussion with King Chung Huang and Paul Pival this morning, about one of King’s current research projects. He’s working on the topic of context and identity - what it would mean from both institutional and individual perspectives, if our digital identities and contexts were pulled out of the silos of Blackboard, email, and other isolated and closed systems. What would it mean if every person, group, and place has a URL, which is aware of contexts (institutional, academic, geographical, temporal, etc…) and is also able to gather and provide lists of relevant resources.
A Person would have what is essentially a profile (name, role, contact info, interests, courses, websites, etc…), a Group would describe its type (department, faculty, course, session, club, etc…) as well as lists of relevant bits of info (uses a wiki, has a Blackboard course, meets at this location at this time, has these members, etc…). And Places would describe physical locations, knowing which resources are available, where they are, which Persons and Groups are interested in the Place, as well as scheduling information, etc… (hmm… do we need a fourth primitive type of Time?)
At first blush, it felt like a “portal” problem. Set up a personal Pageflakes or Netvibes page, dropping in some relevant widgets and links. Everyone can customize their own page, and a directory could be created to help discover people, groups, and places.
But that approach loses any real meaning of the contexts. It’s just a dumb content display utility, without being aware of the meaning of the contexts of the content, or of the relationships between people, groups and places.
We talked for awhile, and came to the realization that there is a missing fundamental concept. One that describes the identity and context, and ties the relevant bits of salient info together in a way that can then be used to build novel applications.
Currently, a prof sets up a Blackboard course. They add content to the course. They add Links to various bits. But none of this stuff really knows the context - just that it’s some text that’s been pasted into a container within Blackboard. A prof could spend a lot of time and effort building up a course site in Blackboard, only to kill it at the end of the semester. (sure, it could be cloned, but again that’s context-unaware).
What if the course was just a Group, set up with its own identity and context, and aware of various bits of information. Is Called Mythical Course 301. Has Course ID of MYTHCRSE301. Has Professor… Has TAs… Has Blackboard Course… Uses Wiki at… Podcasts available at… Meets MWF 1000-1050 at ST148…
The idea that Paul came up with is that this is related to the mythical EduGlu concept, but as a necessary first step that is currently missing. Right now, there would be much manual labour to set up an EduGlu service to aggregate activity that happens as part of the practice of teaching and learning. What if we could take advantage of the contexts of Person, Group, and Place to automate that process? We could pull sets of RSS feeds into the aggregator, apply some processing, and export different formats for use in different contexts. Map views. Calendar views. Timeline views. Analysis of individual and group contributions. Interaction analysis. etc…
But, is there some tool, application or platform that is currently able to handle this abstracted concept of context - of Person, Group and Place - that can be used to create a flexible *cough*portal*ahem* to manage and display the torrents of centralized and decentralized information?
Image courtesy of Looking for Fish tacos at ELI 2006, aka CogDog.
Well, I have finally gotten a free minute to get this all down, and get it down I will in hopes that I can drum up some help and support in working through a couple of the issues we’re having with FeedWordPress. So, here goes my state of the union address for FeedWordPress syndicating student work to class blogs on UMW Blogs….
First, FeedWordPress is the real deal, it is a solid interface, not too complicated, works out-of-the-box without cron plugins, and makes syndication a breeze. (D’Arcy overviews it beautifully here). Combine this simple syndication with all the tag and category feeds made available by Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin and you got the goods, EDUGLU-o-rama! As the great Mara Scanlon said after we demonstrated the power of FeedWordPress for her Ethics and Literature course today, “This is getting so much easier!” And that it is, she suffered through the days of BDP RSS and the untold issues with WP-Autoblog last year with character and fortitude, and her recognizing this afternoon that the syndication angle is coming together was a morale boost, for she doesn’t compliment ed tech stuff often or lightly.
So, I’m really excited. I can see some real potential and power here, we have over 15 classes using some version of FeedWordPress syndication, and for the most part it works seamlessly, enter one feed for a class tag, and the course blog populates itself, aggregating the student blog posts tagged accordingly. All is good….well, almost good.
Here are some of the issues we have run up against in the last week, in order of gravity:
1) For a few classes we are actually feeding the posts in with comments turned off and the permalink sending the reader back to the original blog. This works well when the feed is first syndicated in FeedWordPress. However, after that the subsequent posts that are pulled in link within the course blog, the permalink no longer send the reader back to the original post on the student’s blog. This sucks! This was a way to allow posts to aggregate in one place, but lead the rest of the class back to the student’s space, particularly useful if the class is subscribing to the course blog feed, for all the feeds will immediately take the reader to the student’s blog, a way to aggregate feeds from a variety of sites off one feed (a kind of tag specific OPML feed for class sites). So, this one is major, and it ain’t working as of now 
2) This may be related to number one, but for several feeds that I click on that have been aggregated via FeedWordPress I get the following error:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_insert_category() in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/sitewide-tags.php on line 120
Making me think there may be a correlation between the FeedWordpress issues and the Sitewide Tags plugin. Anyone experience anything similar to this?
3) After FeedWordPress is activated and up and running, if you try and create a Link (just a plain old link in the Write–>Link tab) it actually creates a new, malformed feed in FeedWordPress. Bizarre. This doesn’t necessarily hurt anything that I know of, and I stress that I know of.
4) FeedWordPress doesn’t pull in tags from syndicated posts. Not a huge deal for us right now, but it would be useful.
5) The creation of categories from syndicated posts doesn’t work out-of-the-box. You have to actually update the rss-functions.php and rss.php files using the two they provide in the MagpieRSS Upgrade folder that comes with the FeedWordPres plugin (thanks for pointing this out, D’Arcy).
Ok, that’s it. I’m gonna post a modified version of this on the WPMu forums as well to see if anyone knows anything. The plugin author, Charles Johnson, seems to have been busy with other things and hasn’t upgraded his plugin for WP/Mu 2.6+, and frankly the guys built it out and supported it brilliantly. And once your plugin becomes popular, it must seem like as much as a burden as a service to constantly update and maintain it, I’ve seen it happen with a number of good syndication plugins which makes me nervous. We need to support these folks, and help them develop it out, or contribute accordingly.
So, there it is. FeedWordPress is about as close as we’ve come to realizing the syndication bus in major way, mad props to Andre Malan for turning me onto it again at Norther Voice this past February, and if anyone has any ideas for making it work a bit more consistently don’t be shy.
Oh yeah, one more thing.
The BDP RSS widget Andre Malan created for allowing people to add their feeds to a site via BDP RSS would make even more sense these days for FeedWordPress.
I’ve been deep in thought, planning a set of resources to support a community project, and have been struggling with how to best position these resources to best reflect a dynamic, engaged, face-to-face set of communities.
My initial reaction was that the communities need to exist first face-to-face, and that any online resources are supplementary and intended simply to continue and extend their conversations. The online resources are not the community. I think this part is pretty obvious.
My second reaction was that I should whip up a new site in Drupal to host the online portion of the communities - discussions, notes, questions, presentations, etc… I’ve even deployed the site and begun to craft it to reflect where I hope to help steer the communities.
But then, after thinking over Cole’s post, I started thinking that the right tack would be to just have the community members publish wherever they like (with a few suggestions offered) and pull their various bits back together in one central aggregation site to help them track the activities. It provides much more flexibility, and each community would be able to draw on any tools and resources they wished to use.
BUT.
After thinking some more, I realized that most people aren’t in the same headspace as the edtech geeks like myself. They don’t get eduglu. They don’t get distributed publishing. They don’t get aggregation. Or tagging, or rss, or rip-mix-burn. And, quite possibly, they shouldn’t have to. I take a fair number of things for granted in how I interact with various resources online. Most people don’t have the context to make sense of this, and forcing them to jump into the pool without first sticking their toes in is not productive - people will be overwhelmed, overstimulated, and alienated.
They’re in a place where they need some guidance. Not authoritarian mandates, but simple guidance. They need constraints and limits, because without them all they’ll see and hear is noise. They won’t be able to participate effectively in distributed conversations, because they will have difficulty even finding the various threads.
There are a few parameters in how a community can select resources, and I think these parameters also reflect the style of the community itself. Here’s a grossly oversimplified 5-minute diagram to help illustrate:
What we’re trying to do is hit the sweet spot, where a community resource has enough flexibility, support, control, and ease of use to enable a high quality online experience to help extend the community.
I’m now convinced that my initial draft at the centralized website resource “hub” for the community is the right approach. I’ll be providing means for the individuals within the community to basically do whatever they want to, to create their own groups (both formal and ad hoc), and to publish whatever they want within the resource. But - they won’t be required to use this website. If they want to move into a WikiSpace, or start up a WordPress blog, or any of a billion other options, they are free (and welcome) to do so. But by starting things in a more centralized and safe place, there is less risk of leaving people out in the cold by forcing them to move too quickly.
So, to pick up on parts 1 and 2, part 3 is an examination of some of the uses and possibilities of feed-driven architecture for dealing with the varying ways we might understand a portfolio, which—as Stephen Downes notes here—is in the midst of a pretty significant transformation. A change premised on re-imagining the portfolio as not so much a static receptacle for work completed, but a dynamic space for both reflection and presentation of an on-going development, or “portfolio-ing” as Alan Levine’s comment points out. This shift parallels the way many are approaching their actual work in this field (and many others, something Jon Udell calls professional blogging) as part of an ongoing, networked conversation about process and collaboration, rather than some isolated, fixed product.
An RSS-Driven Departmental Portfolio Review Project
All of which makes me think about the project Professor Sarah Allen and I have been working on for her Writing Process course. Each member of the class was asked to create their own blog and post various papers and revisions to the blog as a kind of digital notebook in which they would publish the work for peer review and feedback (all of which fed back into the course blog, a now “classic” course aggregated model for using blogs at UMW). The class was focused on process, and part of the approach was to understand writing as a dynamic, unfolding art form that must be labored over with numerous revisions, iterations and approaches.
During this year’s Tech Fellows program Sarah and I came up with an RSS-driven framework for delivering the “final” version of a English majors essays to a secure space so that faculty could conduct a blind review for assessment purposes. The samples would come from a select group of English courses (Sarah’s Writing Process course being the test case). Traditionally this was handled through a BlackBoard drop box, wherein the essays were uploaded without students names and then reviewed by faculty. To do this they would have to download the papers, print them out, comment on them, than convene with other members of the review committee to discuss the them.
The thought Sarah and I had was there’s has gotta be a better way to streamline this portfolio review process. So, what we did was rather simple, Sarah had all her students writing in their own blog throughout the course of the semester, and publish their revised essays as they finished them. Once a student considered an essay to be a final version, they tagged it with “final paper.” We got the sitewide RSS feed for every post tagged with “final version” and fed them into a blog called ELC Assessment.† The assessment blog is now populated with final, anonymous essays that the department review committee can comment upon from anywhere and have a distributed discussion about the writing, better yet it is all easily protected so that only English, Linguistics and Communication faculty can access it (we left the example open, because it’s a proof of concept).
UMW Lablogs
UMW Biology professor Steve Gallik provides yet another example of how an RSS-driven infrastructure can make things a whole lot easier, and provide students with a practical portfolio of their lab work. I posted about this project earlier this academic year and Steve and I will be presenting it at the EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference. This was a grand experiment, and I think it has some serious possibilities for thinking about managing a scientific portfolio of experimentations and labs.
In short, Steve Gallik developed an entire suite of online laboratory resources wherein students can record the results of their experiments, something he terms an Online Laboratory Suite. Well, if that’s not impressive enough, Andy Rush and Steve Gallik conceptualized a way to take the experiment results for each student and create a RSS feed for it. When each student signs up for an account on Steve’s Online laboratory Suite, they are immediately sent an RSS feed that they place within a spam-blog plugin like FeedWordPress on their own blog, choose the category to publish it to, and before you know it they have an aggregated, feed-driven lab notebook (or a LabLog) of their work that automatically updates as they complete their online labs.
What I like about this project is how clearly it suggest that whether or not you can program your own laboratory software like Steve Gallik, having a publishing platform that is framed around syndication effects everyone. If we do have online lab software being used by a department, isn’t it about time we expected to have an RSS feed for student work? Steve’s LabLogs represents a powerful model for thinking about how students can easily re-publish their own labs into a format they can control, re-publish, and re-purpose as they see fit.
The Macaulay Honors College E-Portfolios Using WPMu
Joe Ugoretz, who is the Director of Technology and Learning at The Macaulay Honors College (part of the CUNY system), has been pushing the envelope in terms of the small pieces loosely joined approach to integrating technology into teaching and learning. Joe, with the agile help of Jeff Drouin, has been using open source CMSs, wikis, and blogs to great effect during his first yearat Macaulay. After a few brief e-mail exchanges with Joe about using WPMu as an e-portfolio system, he invited me up to talk his crack cadre of graduate student Tech Fellows about the small pieces loosely joined approach to educational technology. And as always, I focused on the work UMW has been doing with WPMu in particular.
It was great fun for me, in particular because I started out in this field as a tech fellow at the CUNY Honors College almost four years ago. So going back talking about this stuff was pretty cool, and I could warn them to resist getting too deep into blogs and wikis lest they get hooked and never finish their dissertation, only to find they have become a fanatical, raving EdTech lunatic 
So I recently discovered that Joe has decided to pull the trigger on a WPMu driven portfolio project, and it is alrady up and running, you can read more about it on his blog here and see the actual site here. How cool! Joe is an impressive guy, and he is not afraid to experiment with these powerful, open source publishing platforms, which at CUNY means a lot. To quote Jon Udell talking about UMW two years ago, Joe has really put the Macauly Honors College in the catbird seat when it comes to instructional technologies. He is not afraid to experiment with a wide array of open web and open source tools, and he understands the importance of deploying them rapidly and always already as beta to see how they will fare. That is the pace you need to keep currently, and it is why most of the rest of CUNY is screeching to a devastating standstill when it comes to instructional technologies (Baruch being the other brilliant exception, thanks to Mikhail Gershovich and Luke Waltzer).
Moreover, Macaulay has a manageable incoming class of 300 students every year, all of which are distributed amongst seven different senior colleges of CUNY (I think it’s seven?). A small college loosely joined that may prove an extremely powerful example of how these tools might bring a de-centralized learning community into some kind of online focus. Needless to say, I love Joe’s style and I’ll be watching the Macauly Eportfolio project closely over the next year.
OK, that’s enough about e-portfolios, now it’s time to get ready for Faculty Academy, miles to go before I sleep.
† We got the feed for this tag by first using sitewide categories feeds for WPMu where all the posts were categorized as “final paper,” but the MuTags RSS feed extension—which you have to pay $50 for—will prove the better option, for students can just tag their posts as final paper (or what ever) and you get a sitewide feed for the tag without the sitewide categories feed hack which can get ugly. Once you have the sitewide RSS feed for this tag, just activate the FeedWordPress plugin and it will automatically re-publish any post within the WPMu environment tagged “final paper.” What’s nice about the FeedWordPress plugin is that it will sync all changes to a previously published post. Also, you have options to not include post author, you can prevent a linkback to original post, as well as the ability to place all feeds for a certain tag into a specific category of the assessment blog (so all of Sarah’s class papers will be placed in the category “Writing Process”). Groovy! —or should I say Groomy?
It’s been over a year now since my full-fledged burn, baby, burn conversation with Gardner Campbell about WordPress Multi-User, ELS Blogs, the Digital Five Ring Binder, and the underpinnings of re-imagining an online distributed space for teaching and learning that both encompasses and moves beyond e-portfolios, capturing a whole range of activities both for class and beyond.
This is a conversation that hasn’t happened in a vacuum, see Cole Camplese’s post about using the blog as an e-portfolio back in May, 2006 (and several subsequent iterations on that idea). Or Mike Caulfield’s posts here and here on the topic of e-portfolios. Or Helen Barrett’s ongoing discussion of all things e-portfolio. Or Gardner’s vision of the feedbook back in the day. Or Stephen Downes’s on the subject of the space of RSS, aggregation, and distributed student and course content way, way back in the day. The conversation has been one that has unfurled over time for a long while and I enter it very late and only capture a snippet of its history. It’s by no means new, in fact it has held a pretty steady space in the imagination of educational technology for well over a decade, if not longer. In fact, many have moved away from the idea of an e-portfolio altogether, re-framing it as a Personal Learning Environment that can take into account the dynamic, distributed personalized spaces wherein we network, interact, create, commune and by extension learn.
All this said, I want to return to one simple and very unrevelatory idea, how might we imagine a campus cyber-infrastructure for managing a cheap, flexible, and dynamic e-portfolio system? And with that, I’m off…
Barbara Ganley’s 21st century proverb, “Twitter to connect, the blog to reflect,” will lay the groundwork of how we might think about the blog as e-portfolio and much more (I’ll ask many of you to forgive the limitations of my terminology as we get started). This blog/e-portfolio creature might be better understood as a digital frame for experiences or a personal archive of one’s thinking over time (an idea laid out nicely here by Martin Weller as he articulates our collective wondering whether the blogosphere is moribund). I like the idea of understanding a student blog/portfolio as an archive of their throught over the course of their time as a member of an academic community. A space that they can share, interact in, take with them, and build upon as they move onwards and upwards with their lives.
But a portfolio isn’t an archive, right? Well, yes, you’re right smart guy, but we need to spend a bit more time here to move to the idea of featuring and presenting one’s best work as a portfolio so often connotes. An archive becomes the raw material of thought that can be categorized, tagged, fed out, and re-worked in whole series of different and exciting ways. I have said it before, and I’ll say it a gain. With a blogging platform like WordPress and Drupal† you can feed off of categories or tags, which makes the work students file under a particular tag or category easily syndicated to an aggregated course blog –I talk at length about this here, here, here, and here and see Andre Malan’s frighteningly lucid post on the subject of different kinds of course blogs). And by extension, students can use categories and tags to filter specific work for a course blog, a group blog, or even a separate portfolio blog that they feed in only the things they want to feature (keep in mind that students, faculty and staff can have as many blogs as they want, wither on the campus system or elsewhere–more on this soon).
Cole Camplese had brought up the point of using the PSU network drive, or storage space, as a private repository for files that students wanted to keep separate from the blog. I think this is a great feature, and given that PSU has the infrastructure to integrate it with their blogging system it is a bonus. Fore those who don’t have it, I’m not sure you would require a locally supported infrastructure for the job. Might this be better provided by services like divShare, Google Docs, Blip.tv, YouTube, Flickr, and so on. The more I think about it, the shear simplicity of integrating selected Google Docs, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, divShare files, etc. into a blog often makes these services easier to work with then a centralized campus storage/file sharing network. The small pieces loosely joined approach guarantees that everyone takes ownership of their work, takes responsibility for the services they choose, and defines their own digital management plan which isn’t premised on the outdated notion of a central network/storage backbone provided by colleges and universities. Universities can make recommendations, and IT departments and/or libraries might make recommendations, but the choice rests with the individual. As Jon Udell outlines the logic of a syndication oriented infrastructure which makes far more sense for universities and colleges than the current practices of continually trying to maintain and host everything locally. As Brian Lamb put it (and I shamefully keep quoting this, sorry Brian!):
Schools should be in the business of managing data flows rather than in supporting an end to end user experience. We can only dream what might result if the energy going into the campus-wide LMS’s would go into creating flexible and easy to use “syndication buses” or to addressing pragmatic instructor challenges to using the “small pieces” approach — things like student management tools, gradebooks etc. And what about providing the service of institutional archiving and data backups to mitigate the risks of using third party tools?
In my mind, the key to such syndication driven architecture has everything to do with tweaking a few tools (like Andre Malan’s Add BDP RSS and Add User widgets) and perhaps a hack or two to make this work so that the the campus community is sharing their work with one another in a way that is visible and open, while at the same time as simple as a tool like Facebook (which qualifies under Ganley’s notion of connect), but unlike Facebook this system would be open and students, faculty, and staff would control their data (see Justin Ball’s post here).
This is the key, we cannot build a monolithic system that will represent the new breed of “Learning Management Systems” on campus, rather we need provide possibilities for a community to come into conversation with itself and the rest of the world by making it easy for everyone to share their feeds, filter their work to appropriate spaces, and become part of larger community that is not dictated by an overarching logic of management, control, and isolation–those are the tools of nefarious capital D’Arcy Norman and Bill Fitzgerald have come up with an excellent prototype of such a system for Drupal both here and here, respectively.
So, with that, I’ll end the overview and brief and idiosyncratic context and move into some specific examples and how blogs (and in my case WPMu specifically) might be used for eportfolios. I just wanted to stop here and pace myself a bit because my posts are becoming ever-longer, and Jerry reminded me I should make break thi stuff up so that someone will actually read it.
Part deux out at 3 am tomorrow morning
† I imagine applications like Movable Type and Blogger can do something like this with tag/category feeds, I’m just not familiar enough with them, so I haven’t been able to find such features on blogs that are using these applications.
Scott threw a suggestion onto Twitter this morning that has been percolating for a few hours.
It just hit me. CANHEIT is here at UCalgary in June.
I can arrange meeting space here on campus. If anyone’s interested in a face-to-face Eduglu/Social:Learn/Web 2.0 in higher ed meetup, how does The University of Calgary in June 2008 sound? Maybe Thursday June 19th? Something during the conference proper? The week before or after? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
EduGlu is a concept that came out of some discussions at Northern Voice 2006 - almost exactly 2 years ago - as a way to make sense of an individual’s distributed content in the context of a course. The problem is on one hand very simple - a person publishes a bunch of stuff, and all they need to do is pull it into a course-based resource. On the other hand, it’s really quite hard - how can software provide what appears to be a centralized service, based on the decentralized and distributed publishings of the members of a group or community, and honour the flexible and dynamic nature of the various groups and communities to which a person belongs?
One of the problems I’ve had with the EduGlu concept over the last 2 years is actually a problem that is pretty common in software development - I was overthinking things. By several orders of magnitude. My initial response to EduGlu was to start drafting database schemas, planning out code and applications, and to think about building the perfect course-based aggregator system. This overthinking went on for awhile, with an evolution and streamlining of the schemas and plans for the application. A project was set up on EduForge to act as the repository for the code that would be developed.
I realized that for this concept to be sustainable, it shouldn’t be a custom application. An “educational application” for this wouldn’t work. I started looking at every application as a possible way to implement the EduGlu concept. I played with Drupal and Aggregator2, but it wasn’t quite ready for prime time. I thought, maybe Elgg? Not quite.
Then Bill Fitzgerald recommended a more robust feed aggregator for Drupal, and things started clicking into place. That was back in May of 2006. It didn’t quite work, and wound up getting shelved for awhile.
In February 2007, at Northern Voice once again, the idea of EduGlu got tossed around by a bunch of people hanging out after the conference. It was generally agreed that there was something to the idea, but that it was too nebulous and ill-defined to make much sense at the time. WHAT. IS. EDUGLU? I played with Yahoo Pipes as a possible implementation. That didn’t work out very well. It wasn’t flexible enough, and didn’t provide enough control to each individual.
In May 2007, I started playing with BlogBridge Feed Library. It’s a very cool directory application, and I installed a copy of it on a server to experiment with it as an EduGlu implementation. It worked pretty well, with users able to add feeds to groups, and tag them as needed. It imported and exported OPML, and provided a web interface to view the feeds in case someone wasn’t using their own aggregator. It was close, but the workflow wasn’t quite there - user management wasn’t advanced enough to scale to the size of a large class or institution, and the concept of directories/folders/libraries was a bit inflexible for what EduGlu would need. It’s perfect for a relatively static directory, but for something where students may be adding and dropping feeds on a regular basis, and adding them to multiple contexts, it didn’t quite fit the bill.
Fast forward a few months, and Bill Fitzgerald is at it again. This time, he posts a full recipe for building a flexible feed aggregation application using Drupal and the much more robust FeedAPI aggregation management suite of modules. Very cool stuff. He’s got the aggregation stuff nailed.
Then, I start thinking about how we’ve been successfully using Drupal to power the websites for some active and dynamic course-based communities. The thing that is different on those websites is that they allow members to form their own groups at will. To create, join, and leave groups all on their own, without interference from any institutionally mandated concept of classes or departments. This is enabled by the incredible Organic Groups module for Drupal. Getting closer, but still not quite there.
And then Cole Camplese kicked things into high gear by posting a link (was it on Twitter?) to a site his group worked up to integrate feed aggregation and social rating. It let students rate the aggregated items ala Digg, and that rating data is used to determine importance of the aggregated content.
Bingo.
The magic combination of features for EduGlu are:
Aggregation of feeds + Groups + Social Rating + Tagging
Plugging all of these concepts together results in a workflow that looks something like this:
Students add feeds to the system, placing them in any relevant groups, and tagging the feed appropriately. Items from these feeds are then aggregated, inheriting the feed’s tags and group settings. Students are able to view the incoming content in any (or all) of their groups at a glance, and apply social rating to sort and rank the items - items ranked over a threshold are pushed to the front page of the site. Tag clouds are generated, allowing easy browsing of content. And a full search engine is available, providing some pretty fully featured data mining tools. The aggregated items are archived for as long as needed, and discussion can occur within the context of the EduGlu website rather than being spread across dozens/hundreds of blogs and other applications scattered around the web.
The beauty of this implementation is that it involved no custom code. I didn’t write a single line of code. All I did was integrate a set of off-the-shelf modules for Drupal. This is all generalizable and re-implementable in any number of various ways.
I’ve been monkeying with a Drupal site that looks like it could fulfill most (even all?) of the mythical Eduglu concept - a website that aggregates all feeds published by students in a class/department/institution, and helps contextualize them in the various groups/cohorts/courses each student participates in. It’s getting really close - it can currently suck in all kinds of feeds, auto-tagging items, and even lets students create their own groups and associate feeds with them. There are issues, to be sure, mostly with respect to honouring the original tags in the aggregated items, and with taking advantage of the social rating system added to the website, but it’s so close I can taste it.
At the moment, there are almost 1200 items aggregated from feeds published by 19 users. It’s only been running for a week, so that’s not a bad start…
One added bonus of using Drupal for this, is that I can drop the Tagadelic module into place to generate a tag cloud representing all aggregated items’ tags. Here’s the tag cloud from the current prototype site:
Just seeing that aggregate cloud makes me smile. I’ll have to work on things like adding a group-only tag cloud, and maybe a tag with date parameters (which could be REALLY useful to build a movie displaying the shifts in tag weights over the course of a semester or year…)
As an aside, I’m pretty sure that this is the first post that I’ve added to all of the main categories of my blog: General, Work, and Fun. I’m pretty sure there’s something to that…
