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Aggregating Student Blogs with EduFeedr: Lessons Learned from the First Tryouts
1. Aggregating Student Blogs with
EduFeedr: Lessons Learned
from the First Tryouts
Hans Põldoja, Pjotr Savitski, Mart Laanpere
Tallinn University
2. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share
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16. 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
31. 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
33. Blogs
User
Crontab initiated
aggregation of
REQUEST with credentials content
EduFeedr EduSuckr
front-end WSDL / SOAP back-end service
RESPONSE with data
MySQL /
MySQL
InnoDB
34. 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
37. 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
38. 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
39. 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)
40. Only Recent Items are Stored
in the Syndication Feeds
• Blogger feeds contain 25 most recent items
• WordPress feeds contain 10 most recent items
42. User testing
• User testing in Tallinn University: 4 courses running
• Think aloud usability testing
43. Future work
• Aggregating recent content from various Web 2.0
services
• Providing visualization widgets for external web
sites
• Archiving the course posts and comments
44. Ideas
• Using EduFeedr visualizations for centralized/
closed LMS
• Using EduFeedr for TEL researchers’ blogs