mara scanlon
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.
Jon Beasley-Murray’s Murder, Madness, and Mayhem course at the University of British Columbia has blown my mind over the last few months. If you are not familiar with this amazing project that brings the full extent of the communal and collaborative power of Wikipedia into the classroom, I strongly recommend you go read Jon’s article on this project here or here.
Now I know I’m given to overstatement, and it is an inherited trait I carry on in honor of my late, great mom (E.L. Doctorow said Houdini was the “the last of the great mother lovers”, but he just wasn’t aware of me). This tendency toward hyperbole necessarily means everything I say should be cut in half and then divided by three to get an approximated sense of the magnitude of any statement I make. Yet, when I see Brian Lamb noting how Jon’s project may very well suggest “the future of higher education”, I can venture my next statement with a certain amount of courage:
Not since Edward Ayers’ “The Valley of the Shadow” project back in the mid 90s have we seen a single example of how the web might be used to re-imagine instructional technologies as Murder Madness Murder has.
There it is, I said it and I meant it! This is the coolest project I have yet to see from any of these open tools. Not only is Jon’s detailed write-up of the project (narrated whilst still unfolding all around him) an amazingly insightful, balanced and intelligent road map for other faculty and EdTech folks to follow, but it documents an open and honest approach to experimenting and innovating in the classroom with one’s students as partners and peers. It is no surprise to me that Jon and his class had such unbelievable success with these articles (3 featured and 8 good articles out of a possible 12), primarily because he was very much part of the experiment and was learning just as much as everyone in the course, and by extension equally as vulnerable. The human element of this experiment is mind blowing, his comfort with making himself so uncomfortable in front of his students is an amazing element of this project that I haven’t seen too many folks mention just yet.
But the question of technology, infrastructure, and resources might be worth a mention here. What did it cost UBC? Hmm, let me think….nothing, zero, zilch. That is so very EDUPUNK! What’s more, not too long after the Murder Madness Mayhem got going the deus ex machina known as the FA Team (Featured Article Team) came out of nowhere to help the class get their articles to the Featured Article status. Just added value of support which is a result of doing this within a passionate, invested community like Wikipedia. How different would this have been if Jon would have done this with WebCT or Bb’s paltry wiki, or some other tool (however closed or open) that wasn’t part of an intensely active and complex community like that of Wikipedia? Jon’s project puts his class truly on the open web, making them interact with various communities while constructing knowledge and providing resources and references that millions of people could potentially see, use, and build upon. Take a look at the article this class built from scratch (the first of their three featured articles), El Señor Presidente, and tell me you wouldn’t be proud of such a masterpiece of collaborative knowledge building. And all of this in less than 15 weeks, have I said amazing yet? Well if not, amazing!
Professor Mara Scanlon in the English, Linguistics, and Speech department here at UMW was trying something similar with her seminar on the Long Poem. Back in January we had a bit of a different approach, we started the article on a local MediaWiki installation and had the class of nine go at it and work on framing a Wikipedia-like article. By the first of April it was to be ready to be set free upon Wikipedia. Mara (who is also very EDUPUNK) and I presented this project at this year’s Faculty Academy, and the future of such endeavors will in many ways take their inspiration from the important work pioneered by Jon and his class. The ideas he lays out so well, like doing the entire project on Wikipedia, being prepared for chaos and mayhem at any point, having specifically defined goals (like Featured Article status), and forcing students to bring an unprecedented amount of library research to the open web are solid pillars of any and all projects that we can muster up here at UMW. And lord knows we are trying. So, I could write more and more, but I have to take Jon’s lead and get ever more familiar with the intricacies of the Wikipedia community, because the future of higher education and educational technology is now about infrastructure, applications, and enterprise, it is about helping faculty and students navigate the cultural specificity of communities like Wikipedia.
