eduglu – D’Arcy Norman dot net

Fully supported hosted Eduglu is coming! | Eduglu — Drupal Social Learning Platform

I haven’t had a chance to check it out since the initial announcement, but it looks like it’s progressing nicely. A social network application built entirely using Drupal and a set of modules.

[Eduglu Alpha 2](http://eduglu.com/sites/eduglu.com/files/eduglu_release/eduglu-1-0-alpha2.tgz) is available now. I’ll have to grab a copy when I’m back in the office next week…

Now, how to reconcile this with my disdain for the concept of the PLN? Because Eduglu isn’t claiming to be the whole widget. It’s a way to connect various sources of content, published by various people, distributed across the internet, and then use that in the context of a class. Where the magic really happens.

from *[Fully supported hosted Eduglu is coming! | Eduglu — Drupal Social Learning Platform](http://eduglu.com/)*

on context and identity

I had a discussion with King Chung Huang and Paul Pival this morning, about one of King’s current research projects. He’s working on the topic of context and identity – what it would mean from both institutional and individual perspectives, if our digital identities and contexts were pulled out of the silos of Blackboard, email, and other isolated and closed systems. What would it mean if every person, group, and place has a URL, which is aware of contexts (institutional, academic, geographical, temporal, etc…) and is also able to gather and provide lists of relevant resources.

A Person would have what is essentially a profile (name, role, contact info, interests, courses, websites, etc…), a Group would describe its type (department, faculty, course, session, club, etc…) as well as lists of relevant bits of info (uses a wiki, has a Blackboard course, meets at this location at this time, has these members, etc…). And Places would describe physical locations, knowing which resources are available, where they are, which Persons and Groups are interested in the Place, as well as scheduling information, etc… (hmm… do we need a fourth primitive type of Time?)

At first blush, it felt like a “portal” problem. Set up a personal Pageflakes or Netvibes page, dropping in some relevant widgets and links. Everyone can customize their own page, and a directory could be created to help discover people, groups, and places.

But that approach loses any real meaning of the contexts. It’s just a dumb content display utility, without being aware of the meaning of the contexts of the content, or of the relationships between people, groups and places.

We talked for awhile, and came to the realization that there is a missing fundamental concept. One that describes the identity and context, and ties the relevant bits of salient info together in a way that can then be used to build novel applications.

Currently, a prof sets up a Blackboard course. They add content to the course. They add Links to various bits. But none of this stuff really knows the context – just that it’s some text that’s been pasted into a container within Blackboard. A prof could spend a lot of time and effort building up a course site in Blackboard, only to kill it at the end of the semester. (sure, it could be cloned, but again that’s context-unaware).

What if the course was just a Group, set up with its own identity and context, and aware of various bits of information. Is Called Mythical Course 301. Has Course ID of MYTHCRSE301. Has Professor… Has TAs… Has Blackboard Course… Uses Wiki at… Podcasts available at… Meets MWF 1000-1050 at ST148…

The idea that Paul came up with is that this is related to the mythical EduGlu concept, but as a necessary first step that is currently missing. Right now, there would be much manual labour to set up an EduGlu service to aggregate activity that happens as part of the practice of teaching and learning. What if we could take advantage of the contexts of Person, Group, and Place to automate that process? We could pull sets of RSS feeds into the aggregator, apply some processing, and export different formats for use in different contexts. Map views. Calendar views. Timeline views. Analysis of individual and group contributions. Interaction analysis. etc…

But, is there some tool, application or platform that is currently able to handle this abstracted concept of context – of Person, Group and Place – that can be used to create a flexible *cough*portal*ahem* to manage and display the torrents of centralized and decentralized information?

on content management and communities

I’ve been deep in thought, planning a set of resources to support a community project, and have been struggling with how to best position these resources to best reflect a dynamic, engaged, face-to-face set of communities.

My initial reaction was that the communities need to exist first face-to-face, and that any online resources are supplementary and intended simply to continue and extend their conversations. The online resources are not the community. I think this part is pretty obvious.

My second reaction was that I should whip up a new site in Drupal to host the online portion of the communities – discussions, notes, questions, presentations, etc… I’ve even deployed the site and begun to craft it to reflect where I hope to help steer the communities.

But then, after thinking over Cole’s post, I started thinking that the right tack would be to just have the community members publish wherever they like (with a few suggestions offered) and pull their various bits back together in one central aggregation site to help them track the activities. It provides much more flexibility, and each community would be able to draw on any tools and resources they wished to use.

BUT.

After thinking some more, I realized that most people aren’t in the same headspace as the edtech geeks like myself. They don’t get eduglu. They don’t get distributed publishing. They don’t get aggregation. Or tagging, or rss, or rip-mix-burn. And, quite possibly, they shouldn’t have to. I take a fair number of things for granted in how I interact with various resources online. Most people don’t have the context to make sense of this, and forcing them to jump into the pool without first sticking their toes in is not productive – people will be overwhelmed, overstimulated, and alienated.

They’re in a place where they need some guidance. Not authoritarian mandates, but simple guidance. They need constraints and limits, because without them all they’ll see and hear is noise. They won’t be able to participate effectively in distributed conversations, because they will have difficulty even finding the various threads.

There are a few parameters in how a community can select resources, and I think these parameters also reflect the style of the community itself. Here’s a grossly oversimplified 5-minute diagram to help illustrate:

What we’re trying to do is hit the sweet spot, where a community resource has enough flexibility, support, control, and ease of use to enable a high quality online experience to help extend the community.

I’m now convinced that my initial draft at the centralized website resource “hub” for the community is the right approach. I’ll be providing means for the individuals within the community to basically do whatever they want to, to create their own groups (both formal and ad hoc), and to publish whatever they want within the resource. But – they won’t be required to use this website. If they want to move into a WikiSpace, or start up a WordPress blog, or any of a billion other options, they are free (and welcome) to do so. But by starting things in a more centralized and safe place, there is less risk of leaving people out in the cold by forcing them to move too quickly.

EduGlu Screencast

I just recorded a (very) quick and dirty screencast to demo the EduGlu sandbox prototype that was put together in Drupal. It’s a 23 minute session, and clocks in at 28 MB. I probably rambled a bit more than I should have, but you’ll get the idea…

(The Anarchy Media Player displays a smallish video embedded on this post, but you can download the video to view at 640×480 if you want to try to read the tiny text in the screencast)

EduGlu Screencast

Download EduGlu Screencast

EduGlu / Social:Learn Meetup?

Scott threw a suggestion onto Twitter this morning that has been percolating for a few hours.

~~It just hit me. CANHEIT is here at UCalgary in June.~~

I can arrange meeting space here on campus. If anyone’s interested in a face-to-face Eduglu/Social:Learn/Web 2.0 in higher ed meetup, how does The University of Calgary in June 2008 sound? Maybe Thursday June 19th? Something during the conference proper? The week before or after? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Update: After some gentle prodding from Scott, I realize that an incrementalist approach, which is what a CANHEIT session would be, is not sufficient. We need to kick out the jams in ways that wouldn’t be possible in the context of CANHEIT – even if the session was before or after the conference, it would be coloured by Commercial Enterprise IT agenda. Wrong.

I’m withdrawing my offer to host a CANHEIT session, in favour of a standalone event wherever – it could still be at UCalgary if that works out, but it sounds like things would be much more radical and powerful if we were able to impose on Brian‘s hospitality at UBC:OLT.

Reflections on Northern Voice 2008

I’m not going to post a conference recap, and others have beaten me to the punch with eloquent reflections on the event. It’s one of those things that sounds like fanaticism – the sense of wonder usually reserved for such things as the TED conference (aside: could you imagine going to that? how many toes would I gladly trade for a TED pass?) But, Northern Voice has become, or has always been, one of those events that help me form my own thinking, and helps to connect that with the awesome stuff that the really great minds (that I am lucky enough to be allowed to tag along with) are doing.

Jim hit the nail on the head, for me, in his description of the role of the Mythical Eduglu. It’s not about any particular implementation, or even about the concepts and strategies that make up EduGlu. The power of EduGlu, according to The Reverend, is as a Hitchcockian McGuffin. It’s a plot device that moves the story along, giving a sense of narrative focus and momentum.

And that, for me, is the real power of Northern Voice. It’s not about the conference (as cool as the conference is) and it’s not purely about the people (as amazing, cool, and open as the people are). Northern Voice is a McGuffin. And for 2 days or so, every year, we are able to work together to peer into the suitcase. That shared sense of purpose and momentum colours the entire event – the conference sessions, the openness of the people, and the emotional intensity of the whole thing.

So, if it takes the guise of a conference to push the story along, to have everyone from a stunningly broad range of backgrounds and perspectives come together as one, however briefly, I think it’s well worth being part of the experience.

aside: my wife’s family tree includes Alfred Hitchcock, so I like this McGuffin analogy on a bunch of levels

One thing that struck me, when reviewing the photos that I took during Northern Voice, was that the most powerful and meaningful ones weren’t taken during the sessions per se, but in the social gatherings. The magic of Northern Voice isn’t part of the conference itself, although it is definitely fed and inspired by the conference. The real magic is in the deeply intimate connections between the people who gather. And one of the amazing things about the particular group that I am so lucky to consider myself a part of – every one of this group met online first. Several only met IRL at the conference. And yet we are all friends, and there was no ramp-up time required, or introductions needed. We all knew each other, and were able to hit the ground running, as it were.

There is a bit of rabid fanboy that bubbles up within me before, during, and after the event. I can’t fracking believe I’m lucky enough to be able to hang out with these people, and to discuss in depth the things that really matter (and a bunch of stuff that’s just plain fun, too).

If I had to pick a single photograph that represents Northern Voice, it is this one because it somehow captures the energy, the intimacy, and the vibrancy of the conversations. The unreserved laughter of The Reverend. The energetic groove of Scott. Mikhail joining in as though we’ve known him for years – even though this was the first time most of us actually met him. And the piercing calm of Chris, the poet. In the warm, safe, inviting home offered to us by Brian and Keira.

With that said, I am absolutely thrilled at how the entire Northern Voice 2008 photo set turned out. There’s something about the event that causes us all to draw on our strengths, playing our own instrument in the jam session. Mine just happened to be a camera 🙂

on eduglu – part 1: background

EduGlu is a concept that came out of some discussions at Northern Voice 2006 – almost exactly 2 years ago – as a way to make sense of an individual’s distributed content in the context of a course. The problem is on one hand very simple – a person publishes a bunch of stuff, and all they need to do is pull it into a course-based resource. On the other hand, it’s really quite hard – how can software provide what appears to be a centralized service, based on the decentralized and distributed publishings of the members of a group or community, and honour the flexible and dynamic nature of the various groups and communities to which a person belongs?

EduGlu Distributed Content

One of the problems I’ve had with the EduGlu concept over the last 2 years is actually a problem that is pretty common in software development – I was overthinking things. By several orders of magnitude. My initial response to EduGlu was to start drafting database schemas, planning out code and applications, and to think about building the perfect course-based aggregator system. This overthinking went on for awhile, with an evolution and streamlining of the schemas and plans for the application. A project was set up on EduForge to act as the repository for the code that would be developed.

I realized that for this concept to be sustainable, it shouldn’t be a custom application. An “educational application” for this wouldn’t work. I started looking at every application as a possible way to implement the EduGlu concept. I played with Drupal and Aggregator2, but it wasn’t quite ready for prime time. I thought, maybe Elgg? Not quite.

Then Bill Fitzgerald recommended a more robust feed aggregator for Drupal, and things started clicking into place. That was back in May of 2006. It didn’t quite work, and wound up getting shelved for awhile.

In February 2007, at Northern Voice once again, the idea of EduGlu got tossed around by a bunch of people hanging out after the conference. It was generally agreed that there was something to the idea, but that it was too nebulous and ill-defined to make much sense at the time. WHAT. IS. EDUGLU? I played with Yahoo Pipes as a possible implementation. That didn’t work out very well. It wasn’t flexible enough, and didn’t provide enough control to each individual.

In May 2007, I started playing with BlogBridge Feed Library. It’s a very cool directory application, and I installed a copy of it on a server to experiment with it as an EduGlu implementation. It worked pretty well, with users able to add feeds to groups, and tag them as needed. It imported and exported OPML, and provided a web interface to view the feeds in case someone wasn’t using their own aggregator. It was close, but the workflow wasn’t quite there – user management wasn’t advanced enough to scale to the size of a large class or institution, and the concept of directories/folders/libraries was a bit inflexible for what EduGlu would need. It’s perfect for a relatively static directory, but for something where students may be adding and dropping feeds on a regular basis, and adding them to multiple contexts, it didn’t quite fit the bill.

Fast forward a few months, and Bill Fitzgerald is at it again. This time, he posts a full recipe for building a flexible feed aggregation application using Drupal and the much more robust FeedAPI aggregation management suite of modules. Very cool stuff. He’s got the aggregation stuff nailed.

Then, I start thinking about how we’ve been successfully using Drupal to power the websites for some active and dynamic course-based communities. The thing that is different on those websites is that they allow members to form their own groups at will. To create, join, and leave groups all on their own, without interference from any institutionally mandated concept of classes or departments. This is enabled by the incredible Organic Groups module for Drupal. Getting closer, but still not quite there.

And then Cole Camplese kicked things into high gear by posting a link (was it on Twitter?) to a site his group worked up to integrate feed aggregation and social rating. It let students rate the aggregated items ala Digg, and that rating data is used to determine importance of the aggregated content.

Bingo.

The magic combination of features for EduGlu are:

Aggregation of feeds + Groups + Social Rating + Tagging

Plugging all of these concepts together results in a workflow that looks something like this:

EduGlu Content Flow

Students add feeds to the system, placing them in any relevant groups, and tagging the feed appropriately. Items from these feeds are then aggregated, inheriting the feed’s tags and group settings. Students are able to view the incoming content in any (or all) of their groups at a glance, and apply social rating to sort and rank the items – items ranked over a threshold are pushed to the front page of the site. Tag clouds are generated, allowing easy browsing of content. And a full search engine is available, providing some pretty fully featured data mining tools. The aggregated items are archived for as long as needed, and discussion can occur within the context of the EduGlu website rather than being spread across dozens/hundreds of blogs and other applications scattered around the web.

The beauty of this implementation is that it involved no custom code. I didn’t write a single line of code. All I did was integrate a set of off-the-shelf modules for Drupal. This is all generalizable and re-implementable in any number of various ways.

Eduglu and the aggregate social tag cloud

I’ve been monkeying with a Drupal site that looks like it could fulfill most (even all?) of the mythical Eduglu concept – a website that aggregates all feeds published by students in a class/department/institution, and helps contextualize them in the various groups/cohorts/courses each student participates in. It’s getting really close – it can currently suck in all kinds of feeds, auto-tagging items, and even lets students create their own groups and associate feeds with them. There are issues, to be sure, mostly with respect to honouring the original tags in the aggregated items, and with taking advantage of the social rating system added to the website, but it’s so close I can taste it.

At the moment, there are almost 1200 items aggregated from feeds published by 19 users. It’s only been running for a week, so that’s not a bad start…

One added bonus of using Drupal for this, is that I can drop the Tagadelic module into place to generate a tag cloud representing all aggregated items’ tags. Here’s the tag cloud from the current prototype site:

Eduglu Tag Cloud

Just seeing that aggregate cloud makes me smile. I’ll have to work on things like adding a group-only tag cloud, and maybe a tag with date parameters (which could be REALLY useful to build a movie displaying the shifts in tag weights over the course of a semester or year…)

As an aside, I’m pretty sure that this is the first post that I’ve added to all of the main categories of my blog: General, Work, and Fun. I’m pretty sure there’s something to that…

BlogBridge Feed Library in an Academic Environment

I’ve been experimenting with a copy of BlogBridge Feed Library, to test it out for possible deployment for use by students and faculty here at UCalgary. It’s not an official project, but I think it’s important enough to warrant investigation. What is BlogBridge Feed Library (BBFL)? From their website:

Feed Library (FL) creates a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization. It will be the ’store’ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here’s the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization.

It’s a directory. Of feeds. That can be distributed across the internets, and organized in any fashion. It’s been running the Expert Guides section of Blogbridge’s website for several months, and has provided a pretty cool resource for finding and subscribing to feeds. It’s very cool, in that it doesn’t try to do too much. It doesn’t pretend to be an aggregator. It’s just a directory. It provides friendly ways to preview feeds right in the directory, and to subscribe to groups of feeds via OPML representing folders within the directory. Aggregation is left to the individual’s taste in applications. Any feed reader that groks OPML will play nicely with the great directory OPML features. And any app can, of course, subscribe to the individual feeds.

It’s a really great directory application, and has been running well in production on BlogBridge’s server for some time now. But it needs some love if it’s going to thrive in an academic environment.

Currently, there is a small group of trusted stewards, or “Experts” that are given folders of feeds to manage. That’s fine when there may be a dozen or two contributing “Experts” – but how does that scale to a class with 20, 60, or 300 students? How does that scale to an institutional level with 30,000 students and hundreds of faculty playing in the pool? How do you refine control so that a student can add their feeds to the appropriate places, without having to go through a central gatekeeper?

Continue reading “BlogBridge Feed Library in an Academic Environment”

BlogBridge FeedLibrary as EduGlu?

I've been forcing myself to keep thinking about (and rethinking) the concept of EduGlu – a set of tools and/or practices that would more effectively support distributed online publishing while maintaining the sense of group and community needed to make this stuff more meaningful in an educational context. I waver back and forth, between building The One True �berapp To Aggregate Them All, and a more freeform, organic, barebones directory.

I think the lightweight directory is winning. What if EduGlu was nothing more than an organic directory, where people (faculty, students, general public, etc…) are able to create folders and place links to their various locations of their own online publishing. People can create multiple groups/folders for various contexts, and add whatever relevant links they want to in each one. The directory takes care of listing the groups/folders, displaying their contents, and generating OPML containing machine-readable versions of these lists so people can then subscribe to them in their own aggregator(s). Import the OPML into Google Reader. Subscribe to it as a Reading List in BlogBridge. Import it into Bloglines, NetNewsWire, Sage, FeedOnFeeds, etc… Wherever you're happiest. EduGlu isn't about aggregating the ITEMS into one place, it's about individuals sharing their content easily. Which is done more effectively as a directory, rather than an aggregator.

I installed the BlogBridge FeedLibrary application yesterday to start teasing out parts of the idea. It's a pretty nice app (the install process could use some love, but it wasn't hard). It runs nicely on LAMP (or MAMP in my case), and it's free for academic use (not Open Source, but at least it doesn't cost anything for what I need). And it absolutely rocks at doing exactly what I just described.

The idea I'm working on is that a class creates a folder, and interested individuals (prof/teacher, students, others) create subfolders for themselves. Into these subfolders, they add entries for whatever things they publish that are relevant to this class. Could be blogs, Flickr tag(s), del.icio.us tag(s), wiki changes, or anything that they do that generates RSS.�

I'll be playing some more with it, but here's a screenshot of an early stage of the experiment:

�

The little icons give you access to the RSS for each feed, and to the OPML containing feeds at any level of the directory you are interested in. Just want to subscribe to Dr. Speed's feeds? Grab his OPML. Want the whole class in one shot? Grab the class OPML. Want the entire department/faculty/institution? Sure! Want to just read the items directly on the directory site? BBFL will display the RSS feeds inline, so you don't need an aggregator of your own if you don't want one. Want to archive the activities of a class? Subscribe an aggregator to the class OPML, and save all items that come through. There's your academic archive.

It makes MUCH more sense to put the effort into helping make BlogBridge FeedLibrary a better tool all around, as well as for an academic context, than to build a new tool from scratch. Especially when FeedLibrary is so close to what is needed (there are some workflow issues that may need some work if unleashing it on dozens/hundreds/thousands of students, but nothing that can't be worked out).�

I’ve been forcing myself to keep thinking about (and rethinking) the concept of EduGlu – a set of tools and/or practices that would more effectively support distributed online publishing while maintaining the sense of group and community needed to make this stuff more meaningful in an educational context. I waver back and forth, between building The One True �berapp To Aggregate Them All, and a more freeform, organic, barebones directory.

I think the lightweight directory is winning. What if EduGlu was nothing more than an organic directory, where people (faculty, students, general public, etc…) are able to create folders and place links to their various locations of their own online publishing. People can create multiple groups/folders for various contexts, and add whatever relevant links they want to in each one. The directory takes care of listing the groups/folders, displaying their contents, and generating OPML containing machine-readable versions of these lists so people can then subscribe to them in their own aggregator(s). Import the OPML into Google Reader. Subscribe to it as a Reading List in BlogBridge. Import it into Bloglines, NetNewsWire, Sage, FeedOnFeeds, etc… Wherever you’re happiest. EduGlu isn’t about aggregating the ITEMS into one place, it’s about individuals sharing their content easily. Which is done more effectively as a directory, rather than an aggregator.

I installed the BlogBridge FeedLibrary application yesterday to start teasing out parts of the idea. It’s a pretty nice app (the install process could use some love, but it wasn’t hard). It runs nicely on LAMP (or MAMP in my case), and it’s free for academic use (not Open Source, but at least it doesn’t cost anything for what I need). And it absolutely rocks at doing exactly what I just described.

The idea I’m working on is that a class creates a folder, and interested individuals (prof/teacher, students, others) create subfolders for themselves. Into these subfolders, they add entries for whatever things they publish that are relevant to this class. Could be blogs, Flickr tag(s), del.icio.us tag(s), wiki changes, or anything that they do that generates RSS.�

I’ll be playing some more with it, but here’s a screenshot of an early stage of the experiment:

�

The little icons give you access to the RSS for each feed, and to the OPML containing feeds at any level of the directory you are interested in. Just want to subscribe to Dr. Speed’s feeds? Grab his OPML. Want the whole class in one shot? Grab the class OPML. Want the entire department/faculty/institution? Sure! Want to just read the items directly on the directory site? BBFL will display the RSS feeds inline, so you don’t need an aggregator of your own if you don’t want one. Want to archive the activities of a class? Subscribe an aggregator to the class OPML, and save all items that come through. There’s your academic archive.