From Open, Connected, and Social
Contents |
Connecting Sites
No blog (or website) is an island. Class websites, even school or University websites, now grok RSS and syndication in general. Modern websites are run on content management systems that generate RSS feeds for all content that enters the system. Students are publishing their own content to a number of places, most of which also generate RSS feeds.
First, some thoughts
"Be formless... shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot; it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, and it can crash. Be like water, my friend..."
- Bruce Lee
"Communities win. Technologies don't win."
- Tim Bray (in a talk at the University of Calgary)
"... everybody just uses RSS..."
- David Wiley
"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."
- Bruce Lee
"Go public!"
- John Willinsky, speaking at Northern Voice 2007
It makes more sense to leverage the existing activities of individuals and groups, taking advantage of existing communities and processes, rather than trying to reinvent The One True System That Will Make Everything Work. It's better for Universities to be like water, adapting to what students and faculty are doing, or are able to do, on their own, rather than asserting a preordained solution from on high.
Centralized, Institution-Controlled
Centralized content publishing services are offered by many institutions. The strongest arguments for using a service like this include:
- integration with institutional identity management system (reuse your existing login)
- perceived as a "safe place" to publish, without the noise of the public internet
- possibility to create private, secure publishing areas for individuals and groups (essential for some kinds of content - privacy, etc...)
BUT, institution-controlled services do not belong to the student, so when they graduate, what happens to their content?
Distributed, User-Controlled
Distributed publishing provides a large number of options. Blogger. WordPress.com. LiveJournal. FaceBook. Hosted solutions. TypePad. .Mac. etc... Individuals are able to craft a highly customized environment for their personal publishing. Benefits include:
- content explicitly belongs to the individual, outside of the scope of the Institution
- much more flexibility (changing the look and feel, extending functionality, etc...)
BUT, there is no integration with the other services on campus.
Organic, Adaptive Communities
A middle ground is to provide a directory of personal publishing sites, providing Institutional context for the various places that individuals publish content online. Individuals are free to publish anywhere they are comfortable, and by adding a link to a directory it is then available to other students and faculty for use in an academic or classroom context.
Tools for connecting distributed sites
RSS has evolved or adapted from a simple list-of-stuff syndication format, to an essential "glue" that holds large parts of the internet together. Using RSS (and other syndication formats), you can integrate content from anywhere, making content less isolated and more of a freeform open flow.
Tools for integrating content via RSS:
- Feed2JS
- SuprGlu
- Yahoo! Pipes
- Ning
- BlogBridge Directory (example directory for Open, Connected, Social)
- Embedded Directory Browser (ala Grazr, etc...) (example)
