EduGlu Sandbox

Cole wrote a post about how his Twitter network helped him solve a problem. His blog suddenly decided to stop accepting comments, and he wasn’t sure how that happened, or how to fix it.

The spam problem has been the bane of openly available “web 2.0″ sites since, well, forever. Everyone universally hates spam. Everyone, universally, wants to see it go away. Why is it still a problem?

• Phil’s JISC CETIS blog» Blog Archive » Am I an expert?
  
  expertise and quality
• No World Order - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  
  wonder if you can still get a copy of the "interactive" version?
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0
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• Is the Bookworm an Endangered Species? (Harper's)
  
  Condi, Ursula K. Le Guin, books, blogs, the decline of the species, yadda yadda...
• Pioneering research shows ‘Google Generation’ is a myth
  
  Not quite so hard to believe, really...

• The Googlization of Everything
  
  "...dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc."

So not only am I struggling to do what Stephen Downes did more than four years ago, now I can't even do what I did myself two years ago.

It should be a simple problem. Assemble a list of thirty or so student weblogs, allowing them to choose their own platforms, and create a reasonably readable aggregated metablog of all their entries.

Every "feed blender" type application I have tried simply collapses under that number of feeds, and collectively represents a huge time suck over the past few weeks years.

I like the Grazr widgets, but the widget does not track unread entries or provide any sense of which entries are new. Ditto for the promising new Ginger release of Netvibes: promising, but a portal view just doesn't cut it.

Don't even start with me on Technorati. It was never reliable, and now I'd rather depend on carrier pigeons or pneumatic tubes. I tried to be a good ELI conference blogger last week, did my Technorati tagging to no effect whatsoever.

Until now, the best simple hack I had come up with was using the results of a tagsearch from Google Blogsearch sorted chronologically, and running the RSS through the ever-reliable Feed2JS. It wasn't perfect, but it worked OK.

But there are perils with depending on the kindness and stability of third party software. And Google is evidently not immune to that. It seems that Google blogsearch has adjusted its algorithm somehow. In any event, the number of returned entries has decreased in recent weeks, even as the student entries have piled up. Indeed, today there are two fewer entries than yesterday.

So we are making OK progress on assembling a WordPress Multi-User courseblog along the lines of the stuff UMW Blogs does. And D'Arcy is making tantalizing noises of a prototype based on Bill Fitzgerald's work with Open Academic using Drupal. Maybe Stephen Downes's impending release of Edu_RSS will do the trick.

But for now my modest optimism is tempered by a long string of disappointments, and hundreds of seemingly wasted hours.

The main organization I work with uses Confluence as its internal wiki platform (and possibly for blogs too, we’ll see how that progresses). I have never been in love with it as a platform but on the principle that with social software, who is using it is often more important than what they are using, I’m trying to get behind it.

But it is frustrating the heck out of me for a number of reasons. We’ve CAS‘ified Confluence, which is great for single sign-on, but it means that any ‘protected’ space now requires authentication to get the RSS feed. And honestly, a wiki without RSS feeds is a non-starter for me.

Enter Google Reader. I made the switch about a year ago and now it is fairly entrenched in my workflow. Except…Google Reader doesn’t do authenticated feeds. So now I’m faced with either switching RSS readers again (ugh) or getting daily wiki updates via email (are you serious? At least Greader could support the email-to-RSS feature like Bloglines used to, and no, the Gmail to RSS hack wouldn’t work in this case).

Frustrating. Added to that, Confluence as a blogging platform leaves a bit to be desired, and to deal it’s inelegant posting workflow (10 clicks compared to my 1 or 2 now) I am trying out some XML-RPC based clients (because it does, at least, support that through a plugin). Hence, really, the reason for this post, to see if the ScribeFire (formally Performancing) plugin for Firefox will do the trick and provide a simply, free way of posting between both my WP blog and Confluence. Wish me luck. So far the experience hasn’t been stellar, with a memory leak and other bugs plaguing what should be a simple process. - SWL

Tags: google, greader, HTTP authentication sucks

Updated to include August through December 2007 releases

Educause has a series that highlights specific current technologies and boils them down into a mini-sheet that tech coordinators and advocates can use on their own campus. Unlike some of the Educause resources which require membership, this series is open to the general public which means that K-12 folks can access them as well. New brief sheets have followed a monthly publishing schedule with the latest being the Twitter brief posted just this month.

The series can be found here, but the individual links of papers (in PDF format) posted as of 19 July 2007 are listed below. I find looking at the timeline of releases interesting from an anthropological perspective as it illustrates where the edtech interest was focused over the past two years that these briefs have been published.

7 Things You Should Know About:

• Skype (December 2007)
• Citizen Journalism (November 2007)
• Data Visualization (October 2007)
• Haptics (September 2007)
• Cyber-Infrastructure (August 2007)
• Twitter (July 2007)
  
• Wikipedia (June 2007)
• Facebook II (May 2007)
• RSS (April 2007)
• Creative Commons (March 2007)
• Open Journaling (February 2007)
• Digital Storytelling (January 2007)
• E-Books (November 2006)
• Google Earth (October 2006)
• YouTube (September 2006)
• Facebook I (August 2006)
• Mapping Mashups (July 2006)
• Virtual Worlds (June 2006)
• Google Jockeying (May 2006)
• Remote Instrumentation (April 2006)
• Screencasting (March 2006)
• Virtual Meetings (February 2006)
• Grid Computing (January 2006)
• Collaborative Editing (December 2005)
• Instant Messaging (November 2005)
• Augmented Reality (September 2005)
• Blogs (August 2005)
• Video Blogging (August 2005)
• Wikis (July 2005)
• Podcasting (June 2005)
• Clickers (May 2005)
• Social Bookmarking (May 2005)

[tags]educause, 7things, technology, edtech, briefsheet, whitepaper[/tags]

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