People have pretty much lost track of the syndication bus, small things joined in any way, and talking about things like RSS is a sure fire way for some kid to make fun of grandpa on TikTok. It still runs strong in me.
Heck I just tested putting a Hypothes.is RSS feed into Feed2JS. It actually worked.
As usual I digress. Let’s get this blog post back on track.
If you do not read my blog in Grandpa’s RSS reader (oops, did it again) recently I wrote about a presentation I did about H5P that was built in H5P. There is something foul about sharing a highly interactive tool in the flat dead space of presentation slides.
After sharing about doing this presentation in an OEG meeting, one of my colleagues mentioned hearing more and more interest in H5P, and asked if I had an resources I could share. Heck yeah! I just did a talk!
Of course to me one the web’s oldest obsessions is making lists of links.
I did consider assembling a pile of URLs and sloughing them into an email or Slack. But then one of those comic light bulbs went off over the coyote’s brain (geniuuuuuuuus?)
You see, as part of my presentation materials (the main part was an H5P Branching Scenario) I had added an H5P Accordion content type with the usual reference links. And this is the thing.
If I sent a list of links, it’s frozen in time. It’s just a neutered copy of text. But if I shared a web page with my H5P resources embedded- something magic happens. If I go back and update my source, any embed of that resource gets updated too.
They are connected by a thread.
And as it happens I had just found some more excellent H5P introductor resources by colleagues at Thompson Rivers University. I’d link them here, but I want to make you wait to find them.
What I did was to share a short post in our OEG Connect Community (I will contrive any opportunity to get my colleagues to use that space) where I embedded the H5P Accordion (note for Discourse admins, this requires changing the settings to whitelist the iframe source, in this case it is the H5P kitchen).
After publishing, I realized this was in a way a bit of syndication, or more properly even some form of transclusion. And it helped because I realized I had left off in one panel heading the “P” part of H5P! Easy fix at the source, changes propagated elsewhere.
Just to show it, I can also embed the H5P resources here — the TRU links I added are under “Learning How to do H5P”.
This works of course with any H5P and again is the reason why this is so important for the one of the 5? 6? 12? Rs — Reuse. And it’s more efficient reuse than meaning I can download something, schelp a copy somewhere else, and re-upload it. It is in place, and done with little effort.
If you have more good resources for helping people get started with H5P, toss them my way. I will plop them in the Accordion and boom! everyplace this thing appears is updated.
One time this was the stuff that excites people.
It still does for me.
Keep the syndication light on.
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I have to admit that this stuff still excites me. With OER and Digital Humanities being strongly emphasized here at UNF this post and your others on H5P are so well timed. Thanks as always for your contributions, and your continued care for you and yours.