Will’s Similiblog

I’m trying out a navigation solution to my featuritis dilemma. As I’ve got 3 major features on my site - [1] a community blog, [2] aggregated news feeds, and [3] an aggregation of forums postings from selected forums in an associated Moodle course support platform (I’ll describe this, and the reasons for it, in a subsequent post) - each with multiple views - the comprehensive navigation for all 3 features together was growing cumbersome, with a rather lengthy side column of menu blocks.

So - I’ve created a front welcome page using a “Page” node, with a menu block linking to each of these 3 sections of the site; and added links as well to my 3 sections in the “primary” menu, which displays below the header on all page views.

The side-column menu blocks relating to the Community Blog should show up on the various views of the Community Blog “section” of the site, but should not show up on the views relating to Aggregated News or the Aggregated Forums, & v/v. To accomplish this, I’ve set up custom block visibility for these views.

On the Blocks Administration page, to manage block visibility, click on the selected block’s configure link. At Show block on specific pages:, select Show if the following PHP code returns TRUE (PHP-mode, experts only). Paste in the equivalent of:

<?php
$match = FALSE;
$types = array(’blog‘ => 1);
if (arg(0) == ‘node’ && is_numeric(arg(1))) {
$nid = arg(1);
$node = node_load(array(’nid’ => $nid));
$type = $node->type;
if (isset($types[$type])) {
$match = TRUE;
}
}
$url = request_uri();
if (strpos($url, “blog/“)) {
$match = TRUE;
}
if (strpos($url, “tagadelic/list/1“)) {
$match = TRUE;
}
return $match;
?>

The first criterion - $types = array(’blog‘ => 1); - will include this block on all single-node pages where the node is a blog entry.

The second criterion - if (strpos($url, “blog/“)) { - will include this block on all pages where the URL contains the string blog/. I’ve set up the various Views of the community blog, in their Views settings, to have the url blog/… (e.g., blog/communityblog_listview, &c.).

The third criterion - if (strpos($url, “tagadelic/list/1“)) { - will include this block on the tagadelic tag-cloud page that lists my blog-specific taxonomy (but will not include it on the tagadelic pages displaying taxonomy specific to news aggregation &c.)

This was repeated for each of the side blocks that I want to see displayed on the Community Blog related pages of my site; these will now show up when the user is navigating through pages related to the Community Blog, but will not show up if the user is in other “sections” of the site.

Side-column menu blocks for the other sections of the site are similarly configured, to display menu items specific to the News section only on the pages dealing with aggregated news, &c.

I like it - it works ;^)

In the continued development & refinement of my social learning platform, I find myself facing a featuritis dilemma, as elegantly described by Kathy Sierra (illustration from her most wonderful blog):

How to resolve? Navigation? Simplification? A collection of simple sites each of focal purpose, linked with one another, v/s one “swiss army” site? Do I/we need all this?

Aggregators were apparently developed to help shift the web-phenomenon east of “happy user peak” to the left; yet my aggregation site seems to be beginning to slip down the slope past “guess I better look at the manual …”.

I’m wondering about using Drupal’s multisite function, with the multisite_login module, to create parallel sites for separable functions of my currently swiss-army-ish tool - with shared user db’s and single login. Community blog with aggregation of users’ distributed content on one site, community rated aggregated news on another, aggregation of selected Moodle course forum discussions on a 3rd.

Or perhaps I’m just getting too excited about the tools, & need to simplify overall. The tools are just too cool.

Without a few tweaks, posts will be identified as authored by “xena123″ or similar usernames. To make this a truly social experience, I’ll need to have real names resolve as authors; and to add a carbon-based element to the user experience, I’ll need user pictures to accompany posts.

Online conversations can be of very high quality, and can be quite human in character - my little Rosie (the Bernese retriever / golden mountain dog puppy in so many of my postings) came to me through an online friend, as a case example. But I am convinced that there is unique character to face-to-face conversations in the hall or library or the coffee shop across the street, and I’d like to see this platform act as a nidus around which such conversations can form. For this, we need to be able to hang our conversations around names and faces.

For this, we’ll need to configure drupal’s built-in user-picture support; enable and configure the core Profile module to provide a real name field; and install, make a minor hack on, and configure the 3rd-party Authorship module to substitute users’ full names for usernames in posts.

For pictures -

In Admin > user settings, check the Picture support - Enabled radio button.
The picture image path field needs to be designated (e.g., pictures)

In Admin > Themes, click on the “configure” tab; check the Display post information checkboxes for Blog entry and Feed item

Users can upload pictures at “My account”/edit
At Admin > user settings, you can post user picture guidelines - explaining that for the purposes of this site, these need to be real, recognizable photos; and not photos of the user’s dog, “avatars” of Xena Warrior Princess, &c.
I’ve found it handy to bring a digital camera to the first week of classes, and delegate to a student the task of getting pics of their classmates; these can be distributed for users to upload, or as admin, you can spend an evening getting pics up for a more cyber-confidence-impaired user population.

At Admin > Profiles, create a single-line textfield profile_fullname in category personal information. Check the public field - shown on profile page & on member list pages radio button, and the checkboxes for visible in user registration form and user must enter a value.

The Authorship module needs a small hack; as is, it will substitute the user’s fullname for the username in teaser view and in single-node page views, but not in views with multiple full-nodes on a page. To fix this:

open authorship.module, and edit line 157, to read
if( $page || $teaser || $node) {

At Admin > Content type > Blog entry, find Enable authorship module functionality and check the enabled radio button.  In the The profile variable name used to store the real name: field, enter profile_fullname.  Do the same at Admin > Content type > Feed item.

Done.  Now posts - both Blog entries and aggregated distributed user content - will now be identified by the user’s full name, and will be accompanied by the user’s photo.

Have also been playing with drigg, a ‘Digg clone’ written as a Drupal (5.x) module suite. Works very much like Pligg, reviewed in my last post. Voting is done using the drupal votingapi, with extra_voting_forms as the interface. In addition to accepting individual submissions, like Pligg, drigg will import rss feeds, and has a very nice feed import interface. The rss import function depends on the default drupal ‘Aggregator’ module, with the addition of some custom code in the drigg module itself. A provided theme gives a Drigg/Pligg-like look & feel.

I had no trouble setting up an installation & getting feeds to import.

My sense is, after playing a bit with both drigg and Pligg, that if a dedicated Digg-like “social-ratings-of-submissions & feed items” site is desired, without the need for added functionality, I’d go with Pligg; if there is reason to integrate this with other functionality that could be provided by other drupal modules, drigg will perform the same tasks quite nearly as well within a drupal installation. The module suite is under active development, and has come into its present state quite quickly, so I’d keep an eye on it.

Currently, I have a site set up as a dedicated drigg installation; I’ll be messing around with integrating this into one portion of a more comprehensive drupal installation, to see how well it might integrate with other drupal functionality. Drigg’s feed import functionality depends on the default drupal ‘aggregator’ module, which does not play well with the very elegant ‘aggregation’ module I’m using on my social learning platform for aggregation of users’ distributed content; so this strange need I feel to aggregate two different types of content separately on my site may leave me in a pickle (perhaps I need to use Drupal’s multisite and multisite_login capability, & create 2 sites with single sign-in, each using the Aggregation module to its own ends, one to handle aggregation of news and 3rd-party submissions with social ratings, and one to handle users’ distributed content with comment-density surfacing of content? - perhaps I’m just nuts).

For drigg in action, see here:
http://www.drigg.org/
or here:
http://www.fsdaily.com/

I’ve been playing around with Pligg, and have a test installation up at http://pligg.similibus.org, to mess around with. A pretty nice out-of-the-box social-ratings-of-submissions (Digg-like) platform.

The user interface for submission of individual items is very straightforward, esp. with the “pligg this page” bookmark function. It’s also possible to import feeds, as administrator - by enabling the optional/included “RSS Importer” plugin. So this is a decent choice for aggregating distributed user-content item-by-item, along with user submission of 3rd party items and administrator-chosen feeds, with promotion by social ratings.

There’s a lot more flexibility (with concurrent complexity) in what can be muckled together in Drupal, but if this does what is needed, it’s an easy and elegant installation. I’m still a bit muddled re how well social ratings will work for surfacing of user-submitted material in an academic community (I’m intrigued with the option of comment density as the surfacing algorithm) - but for surfacing of material submitted from 3rd-party sources, this will do nicely.

Would be great to create easy user db integration / single sign-on capability with other cms’s (moodle, drupal &c.), so’s to be easier to integrate this into a learning management system suite.

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I’ve just been playing around with an elaboration of using commenting information as an algorithm for surfacing community blog posts (see #15 in this series) - and came across what looks like an elegant interface for this.

I’ve installed the Node Cloud module; cloned my Community Blog view (make sure that the Fields section is blank - this is required for Table or List view, but will interfere with a Node Cloud view; filters should be cloned from the Community Blog view); selected Node Cloud as the view type; and set for sort order #1 Comment: Last Comment Date (descending), and sort order #2 Comment: Comment Count (descending).

Blog posts (and imported distributed content) which have been most recently commented on will now float to the top of this cloud page (these will be listed by post title in the cloud); and font size will reflect the # of comments/replies made to a post. My rather visual mind wraps around this display nicely.

Check it out, in my sandbox site at http://sandbox.similibus.org (set up a user account and play around on the site).

I’ve been thinking a lot about effective strategies for surfacing material of particular interest to the learning community, in an active community blog.

For small communities - and ours, at 500+ students, is likely on the cusp re this - a river of news format, with author tagging and tag cloud display, may well suffice without the need for other surfacing methods. For larger communities, it may become essential to provide a method to surface material of particular interest to the community at large.

As I’ve noted earlier, I’m a bit reluctant - in part on the advice of some test users - to introduce social rating of peer-contributed content in this context (of a community blog for a small, closed learning community). I certainly can see some potentially positive aspects of peer ratings of contributed content - inspiration to make contributions constructive to the group’s collaborative learning, with positive reinforcement for doing so; along with the learning opportunities implicit in offering and in receiving peer review.

But I am concerned about some possibilities - that this could become a popularity contest either in fact or in perception; that ratings might have more to do with agreement with a student orthodoxy than with a post’s contribution to community learning; that poor peer ratings might serve to disenfranchise some students rather than to inspire continued effort. Although offering and receiving peer review may be a valuable learning opportunity and may contribute to maturation of both parties, these lessons likely require more interaction than can be effectively communicated thru an up/down vote.

In less personal settings - e.g. surfacing of aggregated 3rd-party news items, or in more disseminated communities such as those driving Digg - social ratings seem to be the ticket. Am wondering tho if other algorithms for surfacing of content might be better suited to a community discussion.

Gardner Campbell wrote a recent post in his blog, titled Mistakes as Portals. Got me thinking about this question specifically - is the voted-up post necessarily a more interesting learning opportunity than the voted-down post? I’m recalling a forum discussion from a class last fall; unable to find anyone to cover my class, I was forced to teach 2 weeks of a course at a distance, while teaching in Europe. I assigned readings, and set up forums on our class Moodle page for discussion, weighing in on my end from cybercafes while traveling. One student posted a comment that struck others - and me - as rather offensive. By the time I read it, given the timezone difference, there were already several reactive comments posted. I nudged gently with a reply, and watched the conversation shift to a productive learning opportunity that permitted the original poster some recovery of dignity, and incorporated some of her original thoughts into an understanding that transcended the original disagreements. My sense is, that in a Digg-like format, her initial posting would have been buried as unpopular, offensive and unaligned with student orthodoxy; she would likely have remained disenfranchised and we would have been denied a productive discussion.

So perhaps an alternative criterion on which to rate user posts, would be how much does it inspire community discussion? With this in mind, using the Drupal Views module, I set up a “most commented” page - filtering for posts which have received at least 3 comments, and listing these by descending order of # of comments received. Posts receiving active discussion will surface toward the top of this page. Promotion is based not on peer-review as such, but rather on quite objectively, how much did this post engage the community in discussion?

Here are the essential settings on the Views settings for this page, set up in “table view” format:

Fields:

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).