Can Your ePortfolio Do This (RSS)?

Mmmmm….feeds… in an eportfolio…. mmmmm…

Audree has released another new exciting feature for the MyEport software used at her Chandler-Gilbert Community College and the Maricopa wide service we host for the rest of our system. It has had already for months or more, the ability to syndicate content out from an a publish eportfolio (e.g. to enable easy tracking of specific eportfolios).

Now it features the ability to embed content from external feeds into an eportfolio page (see the details and examples listed in the latest enhancememnts). There are two ways of doing this- one is the ability to add one or more feeds as a sidebar to any desired eportfolio page. For example, that rascal guide to the MLX, Biff Cantrell, has a aidebar feed of new MLX items on his main entry page and a collection page, but is side bar syndicating this very blog in his own eportfolio blog (what a fanatic fan!).

This is all set up by a Sidebar editing tool:

Where one can assign feeds to specific pages, and set options for showing posting date, an truncated amount of description, and determining how many items to display.

But wait, there is more! Now in an eport collection page (a flexible assemblage of links to documents, web sites, images, etc), you can now embed an RSS feed using a “directive” code– see Audree’s example of some eportfolio feeds. As you can see, this is a mini aggreagtor!

And you can have both- Biff’s collection page has a sidebar feed as well as an embedded feed from those folks out west.

Now these are my silly examples just to see how it works… the question of creativeness can come in for how thise might be used for relevant purposes:

* A teacher could use either approach to syndicate the feeds from her student’s eportfolios.. in essence aggregate her student’s work
* Students doing projects in groups can cross syndicate
* An eportfolio can syndicate content form other systems where their work is found, e.g. an external hosted blog, a journal that features their work, a project web site, even feeds from say a GoogleAlert or Technorati tag
* More ???

Can your eportfolio do all this? Does it have a wiki inside? podcast feeds? calendar feeds? automatic streaming of video and audio clips?