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.

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

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.

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.

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

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…

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.