cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Sasquatch I I’m pretty sure which trail I am… My progress on finishing the beta ds106 Assignment Bank as a WordPress Theme proceeds in slow lurches, no need to reach for the glacial metaphor. But it should be nearing a more public ready beta test at […]
Brace yourself for another 10 mile long blog post; much like the recent one on the Harvard Future of Learning site, this one focusses on another syndication driven wordpress site. Brian Lamb approached me in mid June about working on this project, and coming on the heels of the Harvard one, I was able to leverage bits of that site’s framework– but it is still nowhere near a copy/paste/go operation. These sites are hand crafted.
Art+Reconciliation addresses current issues in Canada dealing with the history of residential schools and the ongoing work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The idea is (I might be wrongly paraphrasing) to examine how art and artists can both create awareness of the issues and help generate communication around the issue.
As conceived by Ashok Mathur, this would be an open experience where online participants could be part of the August activities at TRU, where artists were invited for a residential experience in Kamloops, and leading up to a national TRC gathering in Vancouver.
A driving part of the design was an effort to forefront the media that would be part of the activities, as well as infuse the syndication of content from twitter, flickr, blogs, etc. The “MOOC” part of rmooc is open to question- it was not a course per se, but a series of events and performances. It’s not massive, bit was open and parts were online. Who cares, the media shows some amazing gatherings and art making.
For some numbers on what happened (and keep in mind, this is the midway point), the site accumulated:
So if you just look at numbers, you would say “obviously not massive” but numbers are not the whole story, and the goal of the first phase of rmooc was in the events that took place in Kamloops.
Lost in the numbers are thing like a message from Leslie Lindballe, who was following RMOOC from Saskatchewan
hey #rmooc people… are you familiar with http://t.co/NVRMqLbGbj I just made a tile that will go to a #residentialschool survivor
— Leslie Lindballe (@onepercentyello) July 28, 2013
And again, rmooc is only halfway through its course.
As before, I will attempt to review the design elements, the WordPress customizations, and the setup and implementation of the syndication parts. An additional (and new for me) element was using Mailchimp for managing email communications.
Much of what follows paralleled the work I did previously on Harvard’s Future of Learning Institute site.
Here we go…
Last June I was approached by Justin Reich from Harvard (and newly with EdX) about building a site for the Future of Learning Institute, that is part of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education- he was looking for the syndication/aggregation features I had created for the ETMOOC site’s blog and twitter hubs. Apparently, their local CMS (iSites) was a bit cumbersome before to use, but it also sounded like they wanted to extend people’s participating in social media (read more from Justin on the needs for the site).
Harvard calling?
Oh yeah. They wanted to be on the Syndication Bus (Magic Bus! Magic Bus!)
Groovy.
Syndication seems to be in the air, given the amazing stuff Mike Caulfied is doing with Water106. There was also I understand today a ds106.tv episode with Jim Groom, Tim Ownes, and the hatted one, Howard Rheingold, going over how syndication bus works with WordPress (drats to Gila County for having me inside all day for jury duty).
I have grand plans here to document how the Future of Learning site was built, and as I pulled through my notes and the theme code, I got depressed as there are a lot of parts, so I hope I cover everything:
A difference for this event from the previous syndication projects I have done is that it was for a shorter time span (a week institute) rather than a course. Since I was brought in to build the site, not be part of the institute, I did not see much directly of how the site was used and presented.
This is one giant ever scrolling post. You have been warned.
Just to be clear… My title is misleading- there are elements of the ds106 site we are going to be making available soon in a format for you to open, paint, fill, decorate, install on your own site. I worry more about the “in a box mindset” cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo […]
cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Orin Zebest It is not going down the drains, and despite outcries of technologies being dead, syndication based ones are at the heart of what makes the web works. An understanding of how distributed web-based publishing sources can reconfigure and aggregate information in constructive ways […]
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.
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by agiledogs
I’m really getting the hang of setting up these FeedWordPress powered syndication sites- I wrote a few days ago about using this approach to create a twitter archive site for the ETMOOC site. At the same time, and more over the last few days, I have been tweaking the edges and putting into motion what should be a core of the site, the aggregation site for participants in the MOOC which starts next week.
Alec Couros has that draw power! I heard well over 1000 people signed up; the ETMOOC Google+ Community is brimming with intros of educators from all levels and corners of the world.
As a little bit of architecture, the main ETMOOC site (http://etmooc.org/) is running WordPress multisite, using URLs for subsites, and I have rolled out the two extra sites, the Twitter Archive (http://etmooc.org/tweets/) and the Blog Hub (http://etmooc.org/hub).
As of tonight, we are syndicating in 65 blogs and everything is humming nicely with 165 posts brought in:
Check it out now at http://etmooc.org/hub. This post is more a run down of the WordPress mods to organize the site; in a next post I will go over the process for getting blogs into the mix.
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk The “syndication bus” is the Groomian term for the use of RSS aggregation technology that allows a class/community to run as both a hub and a decentralized network of blogs- individuals publish in their own space. The class or central site exists to […]
UPDATE June 19, 2013 Since twitter has killed their version 1 API, there is no longer a public RSS feed provided for twitter activity. Expect new solutions to emerge, one that is usable now is this method from labnol to convert the new JSON feeds to RSS using a Google Script. This method works in FeedWordpress.
I’m growing more and more and more and more (more?) interested in building out more syndication architectures like we have done in ds106, at a range of scales from te 600 feeds we crunch for ds106 to the 40 or so we did for the Project Community Class down to the 2 I do for my own self syndication.
Leaning towards the bigger end, I have been working to set this up for the ETMOOC thing Alec Couros (and about 90 other people it seems) are launching soon. It’s been a great chance to stretch some WordPress chops with FeedWordPress in place for the syndication engine.
Below I outline how I created the site that is archiving the #etmooc tweets – http://etmooc.org/tweets
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by Thomas Hawk We are big on hubs here at the hub of CogDogBlog. In fact, well, let’s say I am writing something profound about networks and syndication, mainly because I am setting up and testing some blog syndication for Alec Couros’s ETMOOC due to blast […]
