It seems like many worlds ago, when “MOOC” was not a term I mocked, but as it happens, this month marks the 10th year since Alec Couros launched ETMOOC, the Education Technology MOOOOOOC. Susan Spellman Cann has been heroic each year in organizing a tweeted reunion The linked “smore” site suggest ways to participate I’m […]
Someone never told the folks who participated in the 2013 Educational Technology and Media MOOC that it was over. They are still at it. FYI: @courosa @cogdog just to let you know #Etmooc in 30 in case you know anyone wanting to join in ? ALL welcome — Susan Spellman Cann (@SSpellmanCann) May 28, 2015 […]
I was not happy with the way my site was working out to present the new collection of True Stories of Open Sharing. I found my categories were forcing me into artificial classification. And the nifty gizmo I had used previously, CoolIris, for the “wall of media”, works, but is annoyingly tedious to update (manually […]
Two flavors of this story, a series of comic renderings (done via the Halftone iPhone app) or an extended storify. [View the story “#nightAtORD” on Storify] A few thoughts. The whole ideas seemed like a fun way to pass the time via tweets, photos, some audio. It actually is an fascinating experience to observe the […]
What mean ye storytelling- the #etmooc version from Alan Levine Thar be slides, slides, slides, way too many slides, from a presentation I did online yesterday as part of the ETMOOC Section on Digital Storytelling. You can find resources mentioned at http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/What+Mean+Ye+Storytelling and an archive is available. It was a lot crammed in. I wanted […]
Inspired by tonight’s #etmooc live animated GIF variety show from Jim Groom, Tom Woodward, Michael Branson-Smith, and Brian Lamb, I could not help but stay up later than advisable making a GIF. It’s a break in the action from grading. No, it’s just like an idea that gets in your brain, and will not stop […]
Have you ever had a pleasant, unexpected surprise happen as a result of having shared something online? I’m building out a new collection of these stories, having done it in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Previously I called these kinds of stories “Amazing”, but I got in a little trouble so now I am re-casting them […]
This cartoon is on a card my sister sent me a few years ago; I have kept it on my refrigerator along with the gallery of dogs past. But I’m not that dog, I’m still at the blogging, April of this year is rolling up to the 10 year mark for CogDogBlog. I’m still figuring […]
My introduction video for the newly launched ETMOOC – something I might be lukewarm about were it not something that Alec Couros was fostering. His own network connectivity, not the linking for the same of linking, is something you want to be part of- witness over 1000 people who signed up, 200 of them fitting […]
cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by epc
In my last post, I quickly overviewed the wordpress customizations I did to set up the ETMOOC Blog Hub. Using the Feedwordpress plugin for a few feeds is easy to do, and it does a rather slick job of finding feeds from a blog URL.
The messy part is dealing with a lot of blog feeds. Getting this part right is more than just tossing URLs into a magic box, you have to have a good grasp of how RSS feeds work in different blogs.
It’s messy.
Because of those pesky humans.
Over at ds106 we have a rather elegant blog registration system that Martha Burtis designed, that actually does a web registration and automatically enters someone’s new blog into Feedwordpress.
The thing is there is a bit of variability to deal with when allowing people to bring in any blog platform (that is what we want), because it can eb confusing to the individual, especially if they are new to blogging, what we ask of them.
The thing is, it’s most easy if someone says, “I am going to do this ETMOOC thing, so I am going to make a new blog just for that stuff” – all we need is the blog URL and Feedwordpress can figure out the right TSS feed to use.
It gets more complicated when someone has an existing blog they want to use to do ETMOOC writing. There is nothing wrong with this approach (especially since it is mine!) but we don’t want to subscribe to everything the blog publishes- we just want posts that are related to ETMOOC. So the person with the blog has to decide (and understand how) to use tags/categories in their posts to mark things they want to syndicate.
This is quite a powerful concept that is easy to overlook – it means I can do things like use a single blog to selectively push content to different places through an understanding of the flow.
This is compounded by the different ways blog platforms are st up for this kind of syndication.
Messy.
