Lila Efimova and Sebastien Paquet (among others) are working through some issues with Trackback, and lately I’ve been thinking about how it might be used in my classroom. One thing I think I like about the concept is that it would allow students to put feedback comments into their OWN Web logs which would then show up as a Trackback link for the student at which the comment was directed. (Does that make any sense?) That’s potentially a good thing from an assessment standpoint. One of the clunkier parts of the paperless, Manila Web log infused classroom is keeping track of a student’s work that doesn’t end up in her own space. It would be better if ALL efforts that a particular student was making, be it homework or projects or feedback, ended up in the same place. The downside, obviously, is that the feedback a student receives would not be as well-organized and as easily readable as Trackback doesn’t seem to include entire posts. (Is there a tweak for that?)
The other avenue here is being able to RSS-ify comments which would mean the feedback would be aggregated by the student who is receiving it. I think there is a way to do that, but I haven’t found the answer yet. Again, that’s not the best way for a student to be able to organize the feedback he receives, but at least it does solve that scattered work issue. Any ideas anyone?
Trackback. I am trying hard to understand this. I have yet to see it clearly described in a way that makes it understandable to someone who has never used it.
any help appreciated.
Phil Pearson has a Radio Comment Monitor that gives Radio users an RSS feed of links to new comments. I don’t think it works for systems other than Radio Userland though.
http://dev.myelin.co.nz/commentmonitor/tracker.py