Will’s Similiblog

I’m quite intrigued with the distributed discussion on the near-mythical ‘eduglu,’ and the work that some folks - notably D’Arcy Norman - are doing to create an ‘eduglu’ platform.

The notion here, as I understand it, is to create a platform capable of aggregating users’ distributed content from all manner of online publishing platforms, displaying this in a central location, and developing algorithms (e.g. social rating ala Digg) to surface material of particular relevance to the goals of the learner community. Threaded commenting on this aggregated material then can weave this previously widely distributed content into a community dialog.

This is truly amazing stuff! e.g., I could maintain my own blog, such as this one, in WordPress, using the WP Feeds widget to create context-sensitive feeds; and publish one or more context-sensitive feeds - e.g., the ‘dogs’-tag feed - to the ‘eduglu’ platform to be shared within that community (see my sandbox site, my ‘dogs’ feed from this blog is imported there). The user is not constrained, and does not need to be ‘brought over,’ to the community platform; does not need to duplicate posts made to a broader or selected audience. Users can publish on their platform(s)-of-choice, and have all this brought together into the learning-community platform.

The issue I face in my institution, is that very few of our students, and even fewer of our faculty, publish any distributed content. We have an older demographic, and due to the nature of our studies, likely have a less cyber-active population than many other learning institutions might have.

I see this changing tho. Progressively over the past two years, there are more & more shiny white boxes showing up in the classroom (our demographic does seem to lean strongly toward macs, much to the consternation of our microsoft-oriented IT department, and to my delight as a mac-fanatic). Students have been enthusiastic about my screencast lecturettes and podcasts, provided for class preparation & review. More of our faculty have been adopting forums in our Moodle LMS for blended discussion in classes and clinics. I can particularly see a wave of possibility here, as this increasingly cyber-capable population moves out into the world as alumni, spread out geographically and in need of accessible continuing education and peer support.

The question of algorithms for ’surfacing’ of information in a platform such as this comes up. Likely in a small institution, such as ours, the combination of a ‘river of news’ with tags (& the wonderful Tagadelic tag-cloud plugin for Drupal) and with buddies links and organic groups for niche discussions, would suffice. As noted in a previous post (#10 in this series), social rating might be problematic, with the potential for individual disenfranchisement (I would love to hear folks’ experiences with peer rating in this context!). Perhaps some creative use of social tagging (such as provided by the Drupal Community Tags module) could extend the benefits of author tagging of content, and provide some of the benefits seen with social rating of content.

On the Social Learning Platform I’m developing (sandbox version at http://sandbox.similibus.org), I’m using the Aggregation module to bring distributed content into the Community Blog. Of the feed aggregation modules available for Drupal, this is the best of the lot for this purpose - it imports the original article’s tags into the Drupal taxonomy, includes enclosures and inline graphics, and creates Drupal nodes from feed items, permitting organization and display of these using the Views module (see #9 in this series, where I set up a ‘community blog’ view which includes imported feed items as nodes in the ‘river of news’ alongside blog posts created within the social learning platform).

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under site_development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.