From the “Churning Through my Overloaded Aggregator Department” comes this discussion over at D’Arcy Norman’s blog about the ways in which tagging and aggregating via “EduGlu” can start bringing all sorts of content together. Now I’m a little slow on the machinations of all of this, but the basic idea here (I think) is that we can give our students a unique tag for any interesting content they find that’s relevant to a course, get them to start collecting that content in their blogs, on Flickr, in del.icio.us and anywhere else where tagging is allowed, and then pump the RSS feeds for that tag from all of those sites into a SuprGlu type page to create quite the extensive “River of News.” (And even if that’s not what they’re talking about, it’s a pretty cool idea just by itself.)
Which reminds me, I gotta remember to tag these posts. Another reason to get off of Manila which doesn’t have a form field for it. So here:
I think D’Arcy is thinking of some other aspects as well:
Do or do we not continue to provide students with blog-like environments that might disappear on them at the end of a course, the school year, or when they leave the system?
Why should we make students write in our less authentic environments if they already have their own? Does a student need to have a blog for every course he or she is taking?
Rather than providing the environment, would it be better to provide students and educators with tools for aggregating content from many sources ala EduGlu?
I don’t know the answers, but I was involved in the interesting discussions around this at Northern Voice and I think some new alternatives are worth investigating