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Presentation in MUPPLE 10 workshop, 29 September 2010, Barcelona.
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Aggregating Student Blogs with EduFeedr: Lessons Learned
from the First Tryouts
Hans Põldoja, Pjotr Savitski, Mart LaanpereTallinn University
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
(massive) open online courses
Learning environment
Learning content
Student blogs
Course wiki and bloglink and tag
link and tag
link
link
RSS
link
link and tag
link
Problem
How to follow and support learning activities which cross the borders of different Web
2.0 applications?
Vision
Requirements and limitations
• support for all major blogging platforms using open standards (RSS, Atom, trackback, pingback)
• no special plug-ins should be required on the student blogs
• the scope of EduFeedr is limited with aggregating and annotating the feeds from both teacher’s and students’ PLE’s and visualizing the process of knowledge building
• only teacher has an user account in EduFeedr, which allows her to modify the EduFeedr settings
• anyone has read access to aggregated course content
Related works
gRSShopper
BIM
Design methodology
Design methodology
• Lightweight prototyping
• Scenario-based design
• Participatory design sessions
• User stories
• Paper prototyping
Current implementation of
EduFeedr
Downloads
• OPML file with blog posts feeds
• OPML file with blog comments feeds
• vCard file for Address Book
• Tab separated file with social network data
Technical implementation
MySQL MySQL /InnoDB
EduSuckrback-end serviceWSDL / SOAP
EduFeedrfront-end
REQUEST with credentials
RESPONSE with data
Crontab initiatedaggregation of
content
BlogsUser
Development platform
• EduFeedr is developed as Elgg plugin
• SimplePie PHP library is used for aggregating feeds
• JSViz JavaScript library is used for social network visualization
• NuSOAP toolkit for PHP
Open source
Lessons learned
Locating the Comments Feed
• Comments feed location is not always specified in the web page
• Currently we support only Blogger and WordPress
• Possible solutions:
- Specifying the comments feed location for major blogging platforms
- Adding the comments feed manually
Linking Student Posts with the Assignments
• Methods
- Link to the assignment post in the course blog
- Assignment deadline
- Asking from the facilitator
• In the first course 10 posts from 91 contained the exact link
Linking Comments with the Participants
• URL in the comment metadata is used to link the comment with a participant
• Comment meta URL’s in the first course (100 comments):
- participants’ blog in the course (3)
- Blogger profile URL (57)
- URL in the WordPress user profile (18)
- OpenID URL (7)
- No URL (15)
Only Recent Items are Stored in the Syndication Feeds
• Blogger feeds contain 25 most recent items
• WordPress feeds contain 10 most recent items
Conclusions and future work
User testing
• User testing in Tallinn University: 4 courses running
• Think aloud usability testing
Future work
• Aggregating recent content from various Web 2.0 services
• Providing visualization widgets for external web sites
• Archiving the course posts and comments
Ideas
• Using EduFeedr visualizations for centralized/closed LMS
• Using EduFeedr for TEL researchers’ blogs
Thank You!
• http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja
• http://www.edufeedr.net