Aggregating Student Blogs with EduFeedr: Lessons Learned

from the First Tryouts

Hans Põldoja, Pjotr Savitski, Mart LaanpereTallinn University

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(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

http://www.edufeedr.net

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!

• hans.poldoja@tlu.ee

• http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja

• http://www.edufeedr.net