Confused About the Blog Uproar
February 17th, 2008I’m confused by all the sudden excitement about importing syndicated feeds and blogs as course sites. Don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% behind the use of blogs in this way, but it seems to me that this has been happening for a long time. Blogs as course sites have been around for a long time and the whole point of having feeds of course materials is to, well, provide feeds to be imported (such web feeds certainly aren’t designed to be subscribed to in one’s common aggregator)… it doesn’t seem too surprising that the feeds work and the links and images and linked multimedia are intact, since that’s the medium in which most people are probably reading these announcements in the first place.
It’s very late, so I’m probably missing something obvious. Please fill me in! On the other hand, the new EduGlu is exciting even in my current condition.
Maybe its not the mechanics of the re-feeding of content, which is like you suggest, yesterday’s news, but maybe what we might be able to do now that adds value to it, more so than just re-publishing, but now, maybe re-mixing and then re-publishing…
But I wonder who the “most people” are in “the medium in which most people are probably reading these announcements in the first place”…. I think as forest dwellers perhaps we are too close to the trees… at most places I have spoken or been to o spoken to people working there, among the mainstream masses, “blogging” is a minor practice, and the mere mention of RSS sens eyes a glaze.
Just thinking about that makes me depressed, back to reading feeds
Republishing is the word, but I think this seemingly magical sensation or excitability of that act is tied more to with the trait of openness of the content rather than the feat itself. What? I can take your web page and instantly republish it? Whaat?
Now if I could easily pick and choose and extract and reuse _pieces_ I’d be more excited.
I’ve started exploring this in the context of the raw XML feeds that OpenLearn publish in addition to their RSS feeds: OpenLearn XML Processor, Redux - http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/013035.html
The idea here is to mine a course for assets and links, and then expose those in asset type feeds (one feed for images, one for audio etc etc). At the moment a lot of context is getting lost; what’s needed next is to find ways of associating link text/alt tags/description info with the actual resources so they become searchable.
I’ve also been warned that the asset stripper may breach rights covenants. This is something OpenLearn need to figure out i think - far too much effort is being wasted saying open content this and creative commons that, but when it comes down to it the cry goes - ah, but, yes, er, no - you can’t use it like that, exactly…. (”so sue me…”
Because I haven’t yet explored RDF, I’m thinking this may be a good time to get my head round RDF and triple stores, or maybe give the Amazon db a whirl?
Chris,
I actually agree with you, all of this isn’t all that new, but it makes for a good hyperbolic blog post!
I guess why I’m excited is how easy it is for a school or university to set up their own re-publishing platform with little or no overhead, making it simple for just about any user. So, I think your brining it back to earth is good, but at the same time this does suggest something beyond simply re-blogging sites, It encourages those publishing these resources to look at their formats for all open educational resources that will play nice with many of the services. WPMu is just one, but the ease and simplicity that I was able to do this (unlike Drupal for instance) suggest that just about any teacher or student has that republishing engine right at their fingertips. Maybe that is what excites me, but I’ll try and tone it down because I know the high falutin’ theory is what gets you going these days
I’m also a little nonplussed by the excitement…but for me I think that has more to do with what I see an over-emphasis on (re)publishing, as opposed to content management. This is implicit in 5tein’s desire to reuse pieces–that’s a job for management, needing tighter structure than RSS can provide, or than WordPress is built for. That’s where I think the Drupal-oriented approaches are having more success Jjust using the SimpleFeed module is, well, a simple way to expose the content to some powerful management options.
[...] Confused About the Blog Uproar 4 Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn, Jim, 5tein, Alan Levine [...]
@5tein - by being able to pull in all and then add/drop chunks in your individual blog or whatever won’t you achieve the same thing? You could even falsify dates to get extra content to go where you need it.
I think in the end it’ll achieve the same thing. I’m not even sure it’d be more work. You’ll be picking and choosing at some point. Now, if you only wanted one single piece of a course importing the whole thing would seem rather wasteful but there are some decent WP plugins that make bulk managing posts much more pleasant.
It’s not perfect by any means but it’s a lot more feasible than it has been.
Tom
If it was so obvious, how come nobody was doing it? People have been using blogs for courses for a long time, but if there were examples of blog-based courses that were structured so clearly, in a format that will be immediately grasped by even the most mainstream audiences, I wish more people would have linked to them…
To respond to Patrick, efficient re-publishing of resources is a huge issue in the open education community right now. There has actually been huge growth in the availability of OER’s the past few years, but the lingering question is how this stuff can of if it will be reused. If you follow the threads back in Jim’s post, you’ll note that Tony Hirst did some very nifty disaggregation of the notoriously unwieldy MIT OpenCourseWare to make what Jim did possible.
And once this stuff is inputted into WP, it can be quickly edited and adapted, right? Pieces picked out? See the discussion thread of Jim’s posts for all sorts of options for using WP/or MediaWiki for reworking, or tools like Grazr to pick out items and rework feeds on the fly.
So, clear proof of concept that free, open source, user-friendly tools can kick the ass of expensive CMS’s and mammoth content specs, and the work is done without any dedicated funding or project structure… just a few people reading each others’ blogs. [YAWN!]
Ha ha! Just read your follow-up post. What would Emily Litella say?
I should have said, as she would have, “Oh, *that’s* different…”
“If it was so obvious, how come nobody was doing it? People have been using blogs for courses for a long time, but if there were examples of blog-based courses that were structured so clearly, in a format that will be immediately grasped by even the most mainstream audiences, I wish more people would have linked to them…”
I like this one…
http://artpractice.blogspot.com/2004_07_01_archive.html
One thing it does demonstrate, though, is how it was a thing of its time. That is, the posts being produced to pace/guide/direct a course, as well as respond to what was happening in it.
Sticking OpenLearn content in a blogging engine provides a familiar context/environment for consuming material, but as a static site it doesn’t provide the pacing that following a blog that exposes content over time does.
This is why I think the next step is in developing serialised feed subscription models, or maybe clients, that allow pacing through the scheduled release of material on a personal basis.
Needless to say, I have some proof of concept demos -
Static RSS Feed Content, Delivered Daily
Pipework - Serial Web Feeds via Yahoo Pipes
(Deprecated) OpenLearn Daily Learning Chunks via RSS
You can subscribe to any OpenLearn course using a prototype daily feed over at http://feedlearner.com - the orange ‘clock’ icon is the one you need to click on…
I think wikis offer an interesting environment too; for people wanting to ‘take’ the course at a later date, they can always use the history mechanism (though to do this properly, you’d maybe need to manage two sorts of time - course time and calendar time; you’d want to be able to follow and make changes to the course in course time, not replay changes made in calendar time…)
Hello, Tony,
RE: “Sticking OpenLearn content in a blogging engine provides a familiar context/environment for consuming material, but as a static site it doesn’t provide the pacing that following a blog that exposes content over time does.”
Both Drupal and WP allow you to schedule when content is published. When I’m doing this type of import w/in Drupal, I set the post status to unpublished. This allows me (or whoever is running the blog) to publish content as they need it.
Of course, this does nothing to preclude anyone from looking up the curriculum in it’s entirety. But, within a learning context, that curiosity isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Cheers,
Bill
The concept has been around for a while and I’ve written about it a few times - I should include here Peter Shanks’s work of last year, which is also relevant - http://www.downes.ca/post/36453 - along the same lines.
Development has been slow because this is mostly unfunded and unsupported work, and we all have ‘real jobs’ we’re supposed to be doing. So when we see the idea move forward a tangible notch, there’s a rustle of excitement in the community.
I think we all know that someone is going to come out of the woodwork one day and be crowned the ‘inventor’ of this (it will probably be someone none of us knows) but in the meantime it’s pretty neat being in on the development of the next generation of learning technology.