By Rudolf Ammann · February 08, 2006
If we’re serious about facilitating our students’ participation in authentic exchanges, then it might be a good idea to make their work more accessible to the Net at large. One way of doing this would be to aggregate their individual weblogs into a separate site: pull along their feeds, merge them into a single stream of posts, repost. Rip, mix, burn.
To illustrate, I have just plugged a bunch of student feeds (aka “sources”) into tawawa.suprglu: the result looks like a pretty convenient gateway through which a group of student bloggers could be approached from the outside.
Obviously, though, Suprglu is not the answer. The service is intended for individual people who want to pull their works from several places around the Web into one single site, and the creators of the site don’t show much enthusiasm for alternative uses: they might limit the number of permissible feeds per user. They’re also slow to update.
Self-hosted aggregation would be preferable.
I’m looking into viable alternatives.
Update #1: some clarification” from a Suprglu developer: “Right now we’re not supporting OPML import or export. SuprGlu is meant for personal usage, and only allowing 10 feeds currently. And 10 seems to be a reasonable number for users to add manually…”
Update #2: Drupal would have been overkill. I used Planet Planet for a home-glued aggegation page: Tawawa/network.
• • •
Previous: Using Dekita Exchange
Next: Global tags on WordPress.com
• • •
Susan
wrote on February 08, 2006:
dear Rudolf and Bee, I am writing a short paper for my Masters on using blogs in middle school. I thought of you immediately, of course. May I use this as reference, and have you got feedback/involvement from middle school kids, too?
thanks for your constant and wonderful help!
Susan B.
∇
Rudolf
wrote on February 08, 2006:
Hiya Susan,
I’m not sure what you mean by “reference�—if there’s anything you find on the public Internet that you’d like to discuss in a research paper, quoting that material will fall under “fair use� provisions as long as you properly credit your source. As with print sources, you don’t have to get anyone’s permission.
Some professors are sticklers for proper citation, though, and in the case of electronic source materials it’s not always clear what the relevant conventions are. The APA’s Reference Examples for Electronic Source Materials, for instance, haven’t yet got around to telling you how to reference a weblog post—but maybe an Article in an Internet-only journal comes close enough. =)
As for the “feedback/involvement from middle school kids�—I don’t think that’s a sufficiently precise question for anyone to be able to answer it in a meaningful way. Maybe you could refine that question and post it to the Dekita mailing list?
∇
Rudolf
wrote on February 14, 2006:
Just in case anyone is trying to implement this: Reblog is an aggregator that has plugins for Movable Type and Wordpress. Feed Wordpress is an aggregation plugin for Wordpress.
∇