This morning, while riding toward campus on a nicely packed bus, with Arcade Fire cranked up and my notebook open in front of me, I had a thought about EduGlu. I was thinking about something completely unrelated, when it just popped into my head, crystal clear.
The solution to the problem of distributed, decentralized, heterogeneous online publishing tools used by students is not to build a monolithic überapp to aggregate them all. There is no One Ring to bind them all. If the problem is "how do faculty and students keep track of content published by people (students, each other, etc…) that they care about?", the answer is "We already do that. With RSS and feedreeders."
So, what if the concept of EduGlu is unnecessary, and instead of building a new centralized app, a set of tools to manage OPML (or XO, or whatever) lists of feeds published by individuals is refined.
A person just creates a list of their feeds, and adds it to a master list. Other people pay attention either to the entire list, or to subsets or cross-sections of it, subscribing to the OPML and/or RSS feeds listed within.
There are already several very powerful ways to do that, most notably the BlogBridge Feed Library tool, which does almost exactly what I was seeing - nested sets of feeds organized by whatever criteria (course? person? etc…) and available as OPML so people could consume the feeds however they like.
The solution to every problem doesn't have to involve "Hey! Let's design and build some cool new software!" - more often than not, especially in the last year or two, it should be more of "Hey! Let's use these existing apps in new ways!"
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This is a crucial insight, I think.
That said, there’s still the tantalizing (to me) possibility of making the pattern of creation/reading/linking available to the students, and perhaps to the educational institution (suitably anonymized), as a way of making that activity part of what it being thought about and learned. Recursion rocks!
But I think you’re absolutely right that the getting started is here, OPML is a core part, and that we’ll learn by doing rather than by trying to write a new killer app right now.
Hi D’Arcy-
Same thing with students “digital portfolios”?
Does it really matter where they reside? What backend they have?
I heard an SEO guy talk today- and you know what he did get right? The number one problem isn’t the technology- it’s that people can’t write coherently.
It’s all about content generation these days- and being the expert in some long-tail thing- but, if you can’t write well- no one will want you.
How’s that for crucial insight?
I still miss subscribe to comments on your “New and improved” drupal powered site-
and- btw- the Tamron glass, beats the Canon kit lens- but the AF isn’t quite as sweet.
Hello, D’Arcy,
OpenSearch has the potential to do exactly this — I have also been thinking about some comparable functionality that ties together friend/contact lists with interests and content — I go into it in a little more detail here and here —
Cheers,
Bill
D’Arcy,
This makes a lot of sense. To create an opml for the blogs.elsweb.org I did exactly that. Used blogbridge to create a series of class feeds and exported them as an opml. The key, as you suggest, would be to make the input of these feeds self-service for students and faculty. That way they could subscribe to their feeds while at the same time you could take all the feeds inputted and feed them out into some kind of graphical interface. Wait, I feel a blog post coming on for we having been talking about a lot of this stuff recently at DTLT.
Gardner - open is the key. by making it as simple as just managing opml, the actual lists can be decentralized as well, linking to opml wherever a student prefers to put it. Of course, we should provide some options for those that don’t have the tools handy, but open makes it inherently flexible, and should scale better - potentially to www-scale - without having to write an app or buy any servers…
David - agreed. Content is the entire point of this. Tools and technology are interesting only insofar as they enable publishing/finding/making sense of content. And I miss the comment subscribe and email notifications feature too. Haven’t had a chance to dig into the code for those modules. Ironically, at the moment I’m not really doing much that couldn’t be done just as well as in WordPress. Oh, well…
Bill - OpenSearch sounds cool, but the Amazon tie-in, and the inherent OpenSearch⢠makes me nervous. Open isn’t really Open if it’s trademarked by a company…
Jim - yeah. what I’m picturing in my head is a pattern whereby a person manages a list (or a bunch of lists) that include various URLs that are appropriate for a given context. So, if someone is a student in Advanced Comparative Invertabrate Zoology, they have a list (OPML, XOXO, whatever) that includes URLs to their blog on the topic (or to the category page on the blog just for that topic), to their Flickr tag page for the topic, their del.icio.us page, etc… They might also have a different context of “Classical English Literature” where they (for the sake of argument) have photos on Zooomr, bookmarks on Furl, and a completely separate blog (maybe a MySpace or Livejournal site).
Anyway, they have lists for each context, and share the URL to the appropriate OPML for each context, so their English prof only sees the URls the student wants them to, as does the Zoology prof (and the students in each class).
Maybe there is another context created by the student called “Student Life” and it includes their Facebook page, Twitter stream, YouTube playlist, etc… and they only provide this OPML to other students…
It offers the organic self-definition of groups, with flexibility to do anything. All that would be required is that the URLs listed in the OPML either be to RSS (or Atom) feeds, or to web pages that have RSS or Atom feeds available for them. Maybe that’s optional, though… hmmm…
Of course, all ‘existing tools’ were once tools that didn’t exist, and were built. Quite recently in fact.
But if the point is (and I think it is) that we don’t need special *edu* tools, then of course you’re right. An ordinary application will do the job just as well - better, because it won’t segregate all the educational stuff.
It makes me think, though, that i should rename Edu_RSS.
My thinking is that people should could use a powerful application to do all this stuff. All along I have been designing Edu_RSS as a *personal* tool. I’ll set up a hosting service at some point in the future to show people what I mean by that (just waiting for NRC approval to open source it).
Because, if you can filter feeds, or subscribe to someone else’s filtered feed, that greatly increases the number of feeds you can be exposed to.
RSS readers have always been, right from the very beginning, based on subscribing to individual ‘channels’ - but doing it this way leads straight to a star system, a world of A-listers and also-rans. It is then no improvement over print journalism or broadcasting.
People should be able to accumulate what amounts to a personalized database of references and resources, that they can access and export in various ways. This base should consist not only of blog posts but all manner of resources, such as people, organizations, events and publications.
And it should connect and enable access to the full range of external services, such as Blogger, del.icio.us, Flickr, etc. So people can, from their personal location, easily move themselves and their materials from one collaborative space to another.
That application doesn’t exist yet - it needs to be built. But it should not be simply an ‘educational’ application. It should be a personal online presence application.
Stephen - exactly! If we really believe in lifelong learning, and learning “outside the classroom” then Edu* tools are redundant at best, or hypocritical at worst.
What we need, instead of new and specialized tools, are some techniques, patterns, and simple real-world demonstrations.
The application does exist. In several different variations. Feedreaders do this already, but most people (still) don’t use them. I think by helping people to manage their own list(s) of the stuff they publish (blogs, photos, bookmarks, twitter, facebook, etc…), and showing how to subscribe to each other’s lists (as OPML subscriptions by the Feedreader apps) we’re getting fairly close to a usable system.
The thing is, *most* of these tools do exist, as in the existing tools deliver most of what we are looking for — really, I use Thunderbird for my mail and feedreader, and that does a pretty good job — all my content gets dropped into one place.
Except that I can’t really share it, or remix it, in an efficient way.
At the risk of oversimplifying, it gets down to the UI on top of the content, and making sure that the user always has EASY access to their work, or content within their interests.
And easy access includes the ability to move content where they want, when they want. And that doesn’t exist yet.
Cheers,
Bill