One of the most interesting elements of UMW Blogs is the way in which things kinda happen on their own accord, and the publishing environment takes on a life of its own. For example, I track a lot of the posts and comments that go through the system, and what I have begun to recognize is that clubs and organizations at Mary Washington are using this space to get their announcements out by using this system to create quick and easy websites with built-in syndication.

So, why not aggregate all the announcements into one space and make things easy for the community to discover, view, and subscribe to? Well, thanks to the wonders of RSS and a WordPress spam plugin it’s a cinch. Check out the UMW Clubs and Organizations blog, which features the latest posts from contributing clubs and organizations at UMW, along with a list of the contributing groups. Additionally, if any club or organization wants to add their site (which can be hosted on UMW Blogs or any other service with a feed), it’s a simple form to fill out to get their announcements syndicated into this site.

Patrick Murray-John has been working tirelessly over the last month to realize an extremely exciting possibility for marrying the Semantic Web with WPMu, although this experiment is by no means limited to this application. What he has been doing is scraping the available data from the uber RSS feed of public blogs from the UMW Blogs Tags Site, and pulling it into a suite of semantic web tools provided by MIT’s Simile project (namely Exhibit and Timeline).

“Why?” you ask. Well Hondo, because these tools provide the means to visualize and connect the activity on UMW Blogs in new ways, check out the Timeline of UMW Blogs posts over the last two weeks here. Or look at how a tool like Exhibit provides interesting ways for creating a more comprehensive directory of users, tags, and posts (something WPMu just can’t do extensively). The alphabetized Bloggers Exhibit that has a weighted tag cloud for each letter of the alphabet which lists usernames, or take a peek at the Blogs Exhibit that does the same thing with Blog titles.

Moreover, we now have a way to collect all the images uploaded to UMW Blogs in one place, and a gallery of top ten lists for those blogs with the most images, audio files, or videos. What this means is we now have a series of alternative means for capturing and mnpulating dta for UMW Blogs that will allow us to search, discover, and make connections more easily than we could previously. We are at the beginnings of this experiment in some ways, yet in others we simply just have to style and re-theme the data accordingly and we are ready to unleash it on the UMW Blogs community to see how they use it and what value it brings to further build upon this already robust publishing platform. Is this what the trendy discussions about Web 3.0 is all about (besides the pervasive idea of cloud computing which is in many ways upon us)?  Finding ways to marry the power, ease, and usability of Web 2.0 tools with the promise of discoverability, visualization, and deep connections that the Semantic Web has promised? I guess we’re about to find out here at UMW.

Even if my recent “Politics Around the Web” posts have turned you off, I hope you noticed that they are a model of a very simple activity for any number of classes - current events, politics, science and math news, more - that want students to read and exhibit critical thinking about what they read. I say “simple” because all it takes is a Google News account, a Diigo account, and a blog.

This screencast shows you how it works, compliments of screencast-o-matic and Blip.tv:

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If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

7 Comments

• At October 19, 2008, M. Walker wrote:

  Clay,

  Very nice! I'm speaking to some student bloggers on Tuesday, reading from a blog and sharing my thoughts, and I may have to share this with them. I'm thinking of using some of the Michelle Bachman material coming out of Minnesota...can you say Joe McCarthy?

  Mike

  M. Walkers last blog post..Wordle

• At October 19, 2008, Seadey Says 10/18/2008 « Seadey Says wrote:

  [...] Creating Critical Readers: A Too-Easy Diigo-Google News-Student Blog Assignment | Beyond School - Annotated [...]

• At October 19, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Did you see VandenHeuven's reply / debate after that interview?

  You're right, it's the perfect current event to connect to McCarthyism. Ooh, and she's from your state, isn't she?

• At October 19, 2008, Louise Maine wrote:

  I would never characterize what you present as wacky ideas as you continue to stretch our minds on the possibilities. As my students are working with another class on animal classification and research into an endangered or exotic animal on a wiki, the natural extension would be on threats to biodiversity. Generally, they would prepare a statement as to their thoughts on the subject. Your approach would show reasoning on both sides that led to the students decision and is a great way to show and demonstrate critical thinking. As always, The true gain is in your thoughts and generosity in showing the process despite the issue.

  Louise Maines last blog post..NEBSA Source for Learning challenge

• At October 20, 2008, M. Walker wrote:

  Yes, she came out of our state legislature, where she led the charge against gay marriage and other "anti-American" activities. Famous for molesting Bush after a State of the Union Address...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqSjtIivjnQ

  Mike

  M. Walkers last blog post..Wordle

• At October 21, 2008, Maggie wrote:

  Great idea, Clay! A great way to entice students to stay engaged with current events and cultivate research and critical thinking skills!

• At October 22, 2008, Creating Critical Readers: A Too-Easy Diigo-Google News-Student Blogging Project | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] is a cached version of http://beyond-school.org/2008/10/18/diigo-blogging-current-events. Diigo.com has no relation to the [...]

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photo credit: Criterion

For the first part of this semester I was in over my head with UMW Blogs. We had come up with the idea (through covert communication with other schools not to be named ) to use FeedWordPress as a syndicating engine. Quite simply, that students create their own blogs and tag posts for their respective courses, which would automatically republish them in an aggregating course blog.

For example, Sue Fernsebner’s History 299 course would tag relevant posts 08fern299, and those posts would be automatically re-posted in the course blog. How are they re-posted automatically? Well, Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin collects all posts, tags and categories into one blog  http://tags.umwblogs.org), that by extension gives a single feed for all tags through the WPMu environment. You can see all of professor Fernsebner’s class blog posts one that blog here: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/
And if you just smack the term “feed” at the end of the above URL you then have an RSS feed for every post in UMW Blogs that has the tag 08fern299: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/f…
Now, FeedWordPress just consumes this feed and republishes all the distributed posts in one blog and allows the permalink to point back to the students original blog post on their blog. Perfect, right?

Well, almost. Fact is that the .2.x version of the Sitewide Tags was not actually working with FeedWordPress that well. What was happening was that FeedWordPress was not updating correctly and the permalinks would only point to the post on the course blog, effectively erasing the link back to the student blog. The only way to fix this was to go into the course blog and delete the posts that didn’t link back to the student blog, and update the feed again which works when you manually pull the feed but not when it is automatically pulled in (which was the root of the problem). Well, this issue is no more, the latest version of Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin 0.3.1 fixes the issue with FeedWordPress and has put UMW Blogs back in the Syndicating cloud (I was worried there for a second, and I don’t miss all the duct tape fixes at all).

The moral of the story? It didn’t take long for the WPMu community to make things right, and it didn’t cost UMW anything but a little bit of experimentation, patience, and sharing. I mean who’s afraid of the open source wolf? These times demand many things, and one of them is cooperation and sharing, not fear and closing down. Open source is not proprietary

Jon Udell has mentioned the idea of Syndication-Oriented Architecture a couple of times over the the last year of so. One of the things I’ve been trying to spell outabout UMW Blog is how it in many ways is trying to approximate a Syndication-Oriented Architechture using a very hodgepodge collection of plugins and widgets.

What does this mean? Well, for me it means that a university publishing platform shouldn’t only be limited to the sites created within that system (in our case WordPres Multi-User), but rather should be able to incorporate work that students and faculty may be doing on other, externally hosted services that are RSS-enabled—like, for example, Blogger,  WordPress.com, Drupal, Flickr, YouTube, etc.

In other words, folks within the campus community should be able to add their feeds to a publishing platform like UMW Blogs and have what they are doing on their own spaces join the general flow of the syndicated data already in UMW Blogs. They should appear in the site wide RSS feed (or even a single class feed); they should show up in the flow of data on the front page; and they should also be searchable in the WPMu archive. Yet, it shouldn’t necessarily be a republishing of their work to another blog space they need to create and maintain, but rather a quick way to drop of their feed so that their work is discoverable by the UMW Blogs community, leaving a trace of their work that will lead people within the community (or a specific class) back to their own space, wherever it is hosted.

We’ve been experimenting with this in a couple of ways recently using Feed WordPress on the Tags blog for UMW Blogs (the tags blog is automatically created when you install Donncha’s Sitewide Feed Tags Page plugin). For example, I can bring in the all the posts for three course being taught by professor Zach Whalen (which he is hosting on his own site in Drupal) by simply adding the feed for each of the courses. The posts are automatically brought into the Tags blog and the permalink directs the user back to the original post in the Drupal course site. The categories can also be imported, comments can be turned off,  and you can assign a specific tag for each of the courses if you want to make the work more visible in the tag cloud.  Additionally, the posts will show up both on the front page and in the searchable archive.*

So, here’s another example of this in action, Andy Rush has created a pretty bitchin’ New Media blog, and he is hosting it outside of UMW Blogs. Yet, what he blogs about there is of great use and interest to the UWM Blogs community. So, all we have to do is grab his feed, add it to Feed WordPress in the Tags blog, and tag it New Media. After that all his posts will be automatically syndicated into UMW Blogs, and they will also be tagged New Media so that he might be discovered in the tag cloud.  Further more, his posts can all be found in the searchable archive, which is just really the search field for the Tags blog.You can see his posts in the  UMW Blogs archive here.

Next step is creating something like a self service widget for Feed WordPress so that mebers of a WPMu community can add their feed (or feeds), tag it, categorize it, and then we’re off to the races.  The end result is that anyone can publish anywhere as long as it has a valid feed, and their work can still be accessible and searchable by their community as well as the world at large.

Now, with all that said, exploring and discovering work on UMW Blogs is still not that easy, you have to see the flow in real time, or wade through hundreds and hundreds of posts in the sitewide feed.  So, my next post on UMW Blogs will be looking at the experimental work Patrick Murray-John is doing with MIT’s Simile Project which he is documenting  vernacularly here and more technically here (I’m like a fish out of wter when it comes to the Semantic Web). Andrew Murphy of Metapizza nails it, “Put in an interested use of metadata and web 3.0 and we’re flying …” That is the logic behind this experiment. How might we be able to make the work happening on UMW Blogs easier to search, browse and filter using Semantic Web tools from the Simile Project like Exhibit? It seems the next logical step to try and open up this space further, and try and make the amazing amount of work being done more apparent and finadable by the community at large.

____________________

* Much of this is inspired by Bill Fitzgerald’s Drupal setup that he outlines here, and while Drupal can do this much better than WPMu, I still think the ease and feel of the individual spaces provided by WPMu makes it worth the extra work, but that is really just a matter of preference and comfort level in the end.

“Fishing with Tom”

In our first episode we were ever so lucky to catch up with Dixie’s most impressive edtech survivalist Tom “Catfish” Woodward. We tunneled all the way down to the swamps of Slocum, Alabama to find him, and we were duly rewarded with some invaluable gems about trotlining RSS to feed the entire family fresh knowledge on a daily basis. Bon appetit!

Credits: Special thanks to Catfish for giving so freely of his limited time and unlimited genius. And once again thanks go to Serena Epstein for applying her special touch.

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.

OK, I’m officially in full blown UMW Blogs blogging mode, I will most likely prove insufferable for the next month or so, and that’s just the way it is, suckas!

Steve Harris Stalinism Blog (Oh what a header)

Today I actually gave my first advanced training session on WordPress to a group of five faculty. And I have to say it was a ball. Professors Steve Harris (History), Michael Killian (Biology), Betsy Lewis (Spanish), Andrew Dolby (Biology), and Zach Whalen (English/New Media Studies) were nice enough to remain polite through a kind of abstract session on UMW Blogs as syndicated publishing platform. Because all of these faculty were to some degree familiar with UMW Blogs, and could navigate the application rather well, we went through a few quick questions about uploading and the new interface and then proceeded to focus on how the syndicated logic of a course blog works. Exactly how does WPMu re-publish students work form their own space into a course blog? What kind of setup allows the student to compose and publish their work on their own blog/academic portfolio space yet feed it out easily?.

These are the questions we wrestled with, and I figured I’d blog the details of this setup for other mavericks WordPress users like Professors Sue Fernsebner and Jeff McClurken who will likely be adopting a similar method. So what follows is a tutorial for creating a syndication rich course blog using sitewide tags and FeedWordPress.

Here it is (is that The Roots I hear on the headphones or is it Yo La Tengo?):

For a while now we have been using BDP RSS at UMW Blogs for aggregated course blogs, but with that plugin out of development for a while now, it is time to explore some other aggregating options. The heirs to the spam aggregating plugin WP-Autoblog (long defunct) are WP-O-Matic and FeedWordPress. Given the elegance and simplicity of FeedWordPress it is the republishing aggregator of choice at UMW Blogs these days. What does it do?  Well, quite simply it republishes a post (or several posts) from one blog into another, and provides a series of option to customize the republishing of a feed.

So, take this plugin (which I will go into more detail on below) and marry it with Donncha’s new Sitewide Tags Page plugin, which generates feeds for sitweide tags from a WPMu install. In other words, every time a person uses a shared tag on a post in their own blog, it automatically becomes part of a larger feed for that tag. So, if students for History 101 tag all their posts for this class hist101 in their own blogs, a sitewide feed on that tag will be generated, and it will look like this:

 http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/hist101/fee…

So, that url above contain the posts from every student blog tagged with hist101, groovy, right?

OK, so the tag needs to be unique and students need to remember to use, but if those things happen, then this is one single feed for an entire distributed class that could consist of as many as 30 blogs. And this is where the details of FeedWordPress come in handy.  So, we have the feed for all the student blog posts relevant to History 101, all we need to do now is activate the plugin FeedWordPress and do the following:

1. Go to the Syndication tab in your WordPress stall that is created once you activate the plugin and add your sitewide tag feed, and click syndicate.



Click on image for larger view

2. If the feeds work swell, no errors, then click the syndication button.



Click on image for larger view

3. After that, go to the Syndication–>Options Subtab and customize the options for your feed (make sure it updates automatically and you consider if you want the permalink to take people back to the student blog, etc.



Click on image for larger view

4. Categories for syndicated posts do work (attention WPMu über admins: I learned this thanks to the ever wise D’Arcy Norman, you just have to do the Magpie RSS Upgrade included with the plugin). You can have the feed you are syndicated come into its own category or even include the categories the students use in their posts. I still can’t get this plugin to include tags fro the original post, however.


Click on image for larger view

5. Comments and ping can be enabled or disabled (you may want to disable them if you want people to comment on the student’s own blog (this is where changing the permalink option to original post might be useful). You all can choose the author settings here.

6. After it is customized to your liking, you can then return to the main syndication tab, and check the radio box aligned with this link and click the “Upgrade checked links”  button. And the posts will start a feeding




Click on image for larger view

If you would like to get a sense of what a course blog like this might look like, take a look at the master course blog wrangler Gardner Campbell’s phenomenal Milton Seminar course taught this summer. I love his design, and he has the permalink going back to the student’s blog, while aggregating all the distibuted comments for all the students blogs in the sidebar. Gardner used FeedWordPress to great effect, and while this blog isn’t feeding off of one sitewide tag feed, there were few enough students so that Gardner could add the students’ feeds manually to the FeedWordPress plugin.

Gardner Campbell's Attack of the Summer Miltonauts course blog

Now, imagine the sitewide tag feed for Gardner’s blog as just one less step to do, and one giant step towards complete automation. We are getting there people!!! Die BlackBoard die

At this year’s EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional conference UMW Biology professor Steve Gallik and I presented together on his Online Laboratory Manual project. I blogged this project last Fall, and it has exceeded just about every expectation we had set out for it —which were pretty high to start with. In short, Lablogs was the perfect marriage between a technically savvy professor who had programmed his own online laboratory suite in Flash and an instructional technology group that believes in the loose syndication structure that provides simple ways for delivering online content. On this occasion using the venerable UMW Blogs as a RSS-rich publishing platform that provided students with their own laboratory notebook (or lablog) with little or no overhead.

I’d go into greater detail, but you may be better served hearing Steve and I talking about the project on the latest episode of EDUCAUSE Now. Also, take a look at the screencast which details the logic and inner-workings of the Online Laboratory Notebook. In the end, It was a lot of fun to present with Steve on the cutting-edge work he is doing.

A special thanks to Gerry Bayne of EDUCAUSE Now for being such a gracious host and facilitator during the production of this podcast.

Download EDUCAUSE Now - Show #5 - P2P Update & Data-Rich Blogging

photo credit: otisarchives3

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World Forum 1 image courtesy of Dunechaser.

This part of the Reading Capital discussion framework looks at the Reading Capital Forums (powered by bbPress) and a feature called Discourse which is the theme Prologue for WordPress blogs that offers a similar functionality as Twitter without the 140 character limitation. Despite what the title of this post might suggest, this isn’t an either/or choice, but I would like to think about how the two might offer different approaches to online conversation and discussion

Forums

The forums for the Reading Capital site are using the bbPress software which has a number of nice features. First off, it integrates cleanly with WordPress Multi-User (the application that is powering the main site) which means if you sign-up for a blog or just a user name on the Reading Capital site, you are automatically part of the forums. You just login on the main site and head over to the forums, you can customize your space on the forums, get an avatar using Gravatar, and take advantage of the rich RSS possibilities with bbPress. This forum software allows you to subscribe to a feed for all of the forums or select forums of interest to you or just specific feeds on topics within a forum. Moreover, it allows users to tag specific topics that display on the main page, and users can add forum topics to a personal favorite list.

BbPress also has some cool plugins that add some nice functionality like embedding images and embedding video by simply copying the URL into a forum post (and it works with a host of different video services). Such a feature could make for some interesting postings of homemade YouTube videos of a reading or discussion within the forums. There is also the possibility of Private Forums, spam control with an Akismet plugin, and a feature that allows users to designate potential flamers as Bozos—which bans the user surreptitiously by keeping their posts effectively hidden from the rest of the forum, although it doesn’t appear that way to them I like that feature!

Truth be told, I don;t have that much experience or success with forums, I do think they could be useful in such an endeavor, and I’d be interested to see if they get picked up and used. Either way, th setup of bbPress is painless, and eploring its features has been fun.

Discourse

These feature of the Reading Capital site is simply a WordPress blog that is using the Prologue theme, which makes it akin to an interface like Twitter. Anyone who gets a blog on the Reading Capital site can easily create similar space for conversation and discussion by selecting this theme (you can also do it just as easily on WordPress.com). The format of Discourse seems well suited for a distributed, conversational space wherein people can quickly post replies and thoughts right from the front page of the blog without going back and forth into the admin section. It has one feed for all the posts and another for comments.

As you can see above, it is a clean, straightforward interface that allows you to post quickly from the front page of the blog. You can also tag your posts. What’s more, the avatars give the space a very personable feel, and each user’s name is linked so you can see all their posts. On top of that, you can comment on someone’s post which can be threaded much like a forum with a reply to a reply.

The other thing I like about this approach is that it allows people who already have a user name or blog within the Reading capital environment to sign themselves up for this space by adding their email to the sidebar, using Andre Malan’s Add User widget. In this way, it would be quite simply for someone who is running a reading group to quickly create an on-the-fly conversational space with no overhead. I have been thinking about this format for courses, and blogged about it here. And while I am not sure such a space is conducive for discussion for a tome like Capital, I remain of the mindset to just throw it all out there and see what sticks, if anything.

So, now we have two more options for continuing the discussion through this distributed framework. Keep in mind, however, none of these tools need be thought of as exclusive to another or mandatory, rather they all represent just different approaches to communally thinking through and sharing ideas about a given text.

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