Blog Aggregation

As with other MOOCs, the #fslt12 MOOC offers blog aggregation

From my perspective this has been one of the most difficult aspects of organizing the technologies we are using for this MOOC. How should we do the aggregation and where should the aggregation appear? Ultimately the decision was to aggregate the blog feeds into our WordPress home site. I wasn’t involved in setting it up, but I have been interested in the discussions around what to do and how to do it.

I have been aware for some time of Stephen Downes’ grsshopper aggregator which he openly shares in detail, but recently I have become aware of the Planet Aggregator .

I have also been very interested in the work that Gordon Lockhart  has been doing on scraping blog comments

In the past six weeks I have been participating (as a mentor) in  CPsquare’s   Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop. This is a community of practice on communities of practice. I have been a member since 2007 when I was a participant in the Workshop. Part of the workshop experience is to work for two weeks with other participants on a project of your choice. This year one of the participants, Mel Chua was keen to try out the Planet Aggregator to pull in blog posts about communities of practice or which reference CPsquare.  This is where the project has got to: Demo site

This project has raised some very interesting issues, most notably the issue of tagging. We didn’t want to pull in authors, so much as the posts that relate to communities of practice of specific authors . Obviously people blog about a variety interests, some of which wouldn’t be relevant to this blog stream.

We discovered that some people don’t use tags at all, even if they write good posts on communities of practice.  Others (me included) are inconsistent in their use of tags or use a variety of tags to represent posts on communities of practice. So discussions at the moment are around whether or not only ‘invited’ people can submit their blog to the aggregator and then whether they should be required to use a given tag, for their blog to appear in the stream.

This has led to a further discussion about boundaries. CPsquare has a ‘permeable’ boundary. It has some aspects of it’s work ‘open’ to the world such as it’s wiki and it’s website , but it also has a private members area where there are ongoing private conversations. Members pay a membership fee.  So the question has been whether any of those conversations should appear on the aggregated blog stream, or whether only members should be invited to submit their blogs to the stream. I think the idea is that the stream will include ‘trusted’ friends who write about CoP related issues, but are not necessarily paid up members of the community.

The suggestion from Mel has been that CPsquare will need a ‘planetmaster’ to manage the invitation of subscribers.

Although a lot of hard work has gone into looking through members’ blogs for relevant tags and categories, Mel and John Smith (community steward for CPsquare) seem to have been able to set up a demo site in a relatively short space of time – so it would seem that aggregation of blogs might be easier in the future – maybe even for non-technical people like me?

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#fslt12 MOOC – Week zero – discussion has started

The discussions in the FSLT Moodle site  are  beginning to get going and quite a few people are already blogging or setting up their blogs.

We have set up an Arrivals Lounge  where people can introduce themselves. And there is also a Course Questions forum, where we will try to answer any queries as soon as we can.

But in  the  Week 0 (Supporting Learning) area of Moodle (which is this run up week to the course), George has posted a great question to get us warmed up – ‘What is Learning for you’ and provided an audio introduction to go with it. Allan Quartly has pointed us to a blog post that he made last year

Like Allan, I feel as though this is a question I have asked myself before.

My thinking on this has been influenced by the work of Etienne Wenger – and his book Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity  and here  Etienne lists the key principles of learning that he outlines in his book. (Etienne and his wife Bev will be speaking to the FSLT MOOC on Wed 6th June)

I have also been influenced by the work of Stephen Downes who says that to learn is to practice and reflect  and that learning is about recognising patterns

 

(Slides taken from – http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/the-meaning-is-the-message)

And much of my recent thinking about learning has been related to the work I have been doing on emergent learning and embodied learning

So when I think about learning I tend to think more about process than product.  I don’t forget that Etienne has said that said that ‘learning is a claim to competence’ but more important for me learning is (as Ronald Barnett discusses in depth in his book ‘A Will to Learn’ ) the continuing process of ‘learning to learn’ and (through this) ‘becoming’ who I am and developing an understanding of my ‘being’.

Barnett writes on p.62 of his book

‘In a genuine higher education, the student not merely undergoes a developmental process, but undergoes a continuing process of becoming. This becoming is marked by the student’s becoming authentic and coming into herself ….. She discovers her own voice, is able to articulate it and deploys it to effect. She brings to bear not just her own intentionalities, but her own will. She not just is carried forward, but carries herself forward.’

My thinking is that this applies to all learners – not just students. We are all learners, are we not?

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