Where did all the conversations go about “EduGlu” apps? Maybe people are doing it rather than writing about it…
Well, here is a nice example from the Maricopa trenches– Shelley Rodrigo teachers a Cinema Class at Mesa Community College and has pretty much set up her class across a trio of Web X.0 tools. The course content for HUM 210: Contemporary Cinema is hosted at UniBlogs.com as are the student blogs listed on the sidebar.
The assignments include things to be blogged, as student watch and write about films they look at, and in addition, they are asked to “furl” their resources (see the “Student Furls” on the sidebar).
Shelley is also asking them to use an “aggregator” ? ?RSS glue tool called GritWire (that was a first for me) that allows not only aggregation, but searches from among a number of user selected sites.
She had another good reason for choosing this tool that I am sadly forgetting now (and hoping she pipes in via my comments). She has been in direct contact with the software developers, getting features added/modified, and even I heard reciprocated when she was in Chicago for a conference by buying them a round of beers. How is that for social software? Maybe more than Shirkey’s “Stuff That Gets Spammed”, Social software is “Stuff By People You Want To Meet and Drink Beer With”.
I am excited to see this kind of real world use of “Rim. Mix. Learn” or “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”, or “Innovative Faculty Trying Cool New Stuff…. 2.0”
And found out I’m currently the ONLY user of Gritwire in the edu world at the moment…
I liked Gritwire because by making all the students my “friend” I could be the one who did the ugly cutting and pasting of subscribing to the uniblog and furl feeds and then they could just look at my subscriptions and click on “subscribe me” to make it their own.
I know that students are pretty happy with uniblogs, dig furl; however, many still struggle with the how/why of gritwire. Part of it is that gritwire is still developing (they have this really cool discussion and “invite” feature now). They also have a wiki within the program. So students can do a lot of shared discussion and composition within the software.
And yes, the programmers are super cool and we went to this kick butt place in Chicago…http://www.fogodechao.com/
Thanks for barkin about me!
shell
Thanks for reminding me about your reason for using Gritwire- it is the Friend of A Friend RSS.
And you deserve the bark! U Rock! It’s great work. I got a few other private messages acknowledging how cool your concept was And see the mention on XPlanaZine:
http://www.xplanazine.com/archives/2006/03/daily_edubloggi_12.php