Update: Changed link to Cindy’s presentation to reflect a newer version.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I spent ten minutes of my vacation whipping up this screencast that describes some of UBC’s Office of Learning Technology’s work in progress toward a distributed publishing framework:
Links here.
Some additional context might be gleaned from this short set of slides assembled by my colleague Cindy Underhill.
Essentially, we are seeing how far we can push the concepts of syndication to extend reuse of content. And showing our undying love of embed code.
As an entirely relevant aside, I see that Stephen Downes’ long-awaited release of gRSShopper is here! I hope we can get the sucker installed on a demo box here soon.
And the MuTags plugin written up here by Edupunk legend Jim Groom might also be a worthy piece of the puzzle.
I have been following the edtech space closely for the last decade as a board consultant(Sec.Math/Edtech), classroom teacher (Edmonton Public Schools) and now as an independent disruptive influence outside the bureacracy. Over the next year I hope to be disruptive enough to perhaps join the ranks of “Edupunk”. My main area of interest is exploring potential of Virtual Worlds (Open Source flavours) as immersive educational spaces and another facet of distributed publishing, (consumer and producer). In close relation to that is an interest in managing information flows. I have managed to get gRSShopper running (for the most part) on a linux machine in my basement and am starting to populate it with feeds and content. At some point it may be possible to explore connecting a few grsshopper nodes together, I haven’t got that far yet, but hope to. Thanks for doing what you do, keep stirring the pot.
I’m in no mood to theorize on Edupunk, but to me at least there’s no litmus test on disruption or anything else. No matter how we think about what we’re doing, hopefully we’re all pushing ourselves to keep getting better.
I’m encouraged to hear about your success with gRSShopper, and would be happy to share nodes via that or some other platform. Let’s keep in touch.
Where can we get the embed code plugin for Mediawiki?
This Mediawiki extension would be awesome. I agree with David where can we get it?
@David and @Richard – we had one issue with the extension that scared us in terms of having embed code on each section. Namely, if people rearranged the order of sections on a page the downstream syndicated content went kind of wonky. I think we have addressed that issue, and rest assured I have commenced nagging operations to get the extension in sharable form — albeit with a couple of the dreaded “known issues” applied to the documentation. I will blog the extension as soon as we release it.
I thought I left this comment, but I can’t find it. I know I *meant* to leave it.
First, this is really cool. 🙂 You’ve given me a lot to think about for a couple of projects we’ve got brewing.
Second, can you tell me what application you’re using for that LEAP Site? Is it homegrown?
You guys rock Blamb! I wanna work for you guys! I can’t wait to see this extension mainstreamed into Wikimedia Foundation projects and others like them (Wikieductor). The whole embed culture seems to somehow get missed in those arenas. Perhaps if you came in on those projects a little, you would help influence stuff and find resources to get the thing bomb proof…