For example, faculty who have blogged but who don't use an aggregator (Feedly, etc.), would need some help understanding different aggregation strategies, and faculty who don't already blog a lot themselves might not even understand the idea of syndication to begin with. Especially since we have not had a good blogging tool in our LMS at OU (D2L is terrible), I'm guessing many faculty might be embarking on this venture without a lot of experience, yes? Building a class around student blogs and a blog hub is something that would be new, so before they get into the technical, I can imagine they might want/need some guidance and also some examples of the courses, the types of course assignments, how blog content gets used and re-used, how students interact with one another via their blogs, how faculty interact with students via the blogs, and on and on. Even if my classes were not included in the create.ou.edu pilot, I am glad to share my documentation of them as example of classes where student-created content forms of the core of the class, with blogs as the main focus for interaction.
Last week I wrote up this post to show how I am using Inoreader and you'll see that it is definitely different from FeedWordPress (Inoreader is a really high-powered aggregator like GoogleReader was, but with lots of syndication options also). Seeing your demo here makes me think I might be able to make good use of BOTH FeedWordPress AND Inoreader. Is it possible to add a bunch of feeds to the WordPress syndication blog via an OPML file? If I could do that, I might indeed experiment with that WordPress plug-in, since I could add all my students' feeds quickly and easily even though they are not at create.ou.edu (Inoreader gives me a nice OPML-export option that would allow me to quickly port all my students' blogs over).
Also, I'm still not sure what you want to do about creating a syndication hub for people to share ideas about teaching... it would be AWESOME to have a space that was pulling in content like that, esp. if we could recruit people to participate. Is this something that can be done to the CTE blog to bring it back to life? Or is this a new project we should start? I would be glad to use OUCTE as a tag at my blog so that this feed would pull in the relevant posts:
http://oudigitools.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/OUCTE
In fact, I'll post this over at the blog now with the OUCTE label so that the feed address will be valid if you want to give it a try! Just let me know! Is there anybody besides Stacy who would be up for participating? I'm guessing if we could get even just five or six people to start, blogging once a week or so, then we would have something that would be worth visiting!
