Comments on: Thoughts on the mythical School Aggregator (EduGlu?)

By: on eduglu - part 1: background - D'Arcy Norman dot net

on eduglu - part 1: background - D'Arcy Norman dot net — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 05:50:56 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Dick Carlson

Dick Carlson — Fri, 25 May 2007 17:11:47 +0000

I really believe that this kind of aggregation opens the door for a whole new competency. (Well, at least an old competency that can be revived.)

I’m talking about the creation of customized learning threads — based on The Long Tail concepts — where a knowledgeable person guides a learner in which components of the whole would be best to reach their goals. (Can you say “reference librarian”?) By taking knowledge of the learner’s current state, applying ID and expertise in the subject matter, a skilled guide could easily create a customized learning path mapped exactly to each learner.

And if you do a great job for me, I talk about it and build your brand. Soon, the value you add is recognized (and rewarded with $$$) because of the time saved in achieving competency. If you’re a poor guide, you fail and go on to some other type of career — real estate, used cars, or despot.

Is anyone aware of software tools that can implement a model like this? Or do we need to build them?

By: Tom Hoffman

Tom Hoffman — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Peerkat, which Rael Dornfest wrote and discarded like, five years ago, was a great example of the kind of app you’re talking about. I did a proof of concept along these lines a couple years ago using Plone, when it looked like I might become unemployed, but stopped working on it when I found a job. Worked nicely with Plone though, using the CMFSin plugin.

In reality, sophisticated applications of RSS have been pushed back about a decade by the collective decision to not use RDF.

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Bill, D’Arcy, keep me in the loop on this one.

As you guys know, my current grad class is at http://technorati.com/tag/span505.

I should say that what I would most like is also RSS feeds (aggregated or not) of the comments. That might also help the students comment, which they’ve been very slow to take up so far. I doubt, however, that’s possible because different software offers very different possibilities with commenting. E.g. it would work if they were all using WordPress or Haloscan, but part of the principle is not to force such homogenization on them.

(Meanwhile, my solution will probably be just to instruct them to comment, or else…)

By: Abject Learning

Abject Learning — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

One more valuable thing about Northern Voice

To get a sense of how getting people together to share ideas and have fun (I have those priorities listed in the wrong order, but I’m in the office right now) can pay off with enhanced capacity, check out D’Arcy’s latest post on the as-yet nonexiste…

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

@Bill - I’m thinking of a combination of boolean tags (tagged with “ucalgary” and “chem355″ and “assignment” - or something like that) and perhaps tying into some kind of identity mapping system (this student is represented by these RSS feeds, and is enrolled in these institutions in these courses…)

@Scott - Yeah! That’s the guy. Very cool stuff. He mentioned that they have a half-time programmer position dedicated to babysitting the AI, so I’m guessing it’s a non-trivial beast to run.

By: Scott Leslie

Scott Leslie — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

So the guy you are talking about was Mark Mayo from the Genome Sciences Centre (http://www.bcgsc.ca/), part of the BC Cancer Agency. I know because I accosted him in the hallway and pleaded that he at the very least publish descriptions on what they are doing, if not the code itself, as it is totally mind-blowing. The cool thing to me was that they were using a combination of AI and recommender-type approaches; because they are a ‘closed’ system in the sense that all the users are using the same software in a common environment, they can build in things like a way to watch which links people follow, and which links their ‘neighbors’ follow, and constantly refine the qaulity of the algorithms that produce the feeds. The middle piece, the aggregator/sorter, is some heavy-duty coding that is quite domain specific by the sounds of it, but it is cool that they are tieing all the pieces togehter, all the people, the aggregator, and the reports from the scientific devices, through RSS. Systems integration… psshaw! Loosely coupled yet still heavy duty is more like it. Very inspiring.

By: Bill Kempthorne

Bill Kempthorne — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I’m doing a presentation at UVIC on Thursday and this concept has bumped a couple others that I was going to cover. The concept of class tags as demonstrated by Jon was a missing piece for me.

The inital step has to be getting the tagging happening so you can find the stuff (with Google if neccessary). Finding that unique identifier for the group that can be relied upon over a period of time.

It is becoming clear to me that the tools for aggregation of content between members of any online community will get better. Right now all I need is ‘good enough’. While it is a little sloppy the current combinations of Technorati, Flickr, and others may be ‘good enough’ for now when aggregated through a basic GLU tool.

I’d like better but I can’t wait around for perfect.

By: D'Arcy

D'Arcy — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

@Gardner - that was actually the point the genetics dude was trying to make - they use the AI as a starting point to feed stuff toward humans who do the real work with it…

@Boris - That’s a good start, too. But we need to be able to give students and teachers a set of tools to let them actively mine the aggregation. I’m thinking of the aggregation as a big soup, with tools letting users do meaningful stuff with the soup. I’ll grab a copy of Agg2 to play with it…

By: Boris Mann

Boris Mann — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe you want to actually keep first class content? Like, grab the existing RSS 2.0 categories and pull the in locally, so you can have a local tag cloud?

Hey, how about our favourite platform? See Aggregator2 for Drupal.