Live Content in Canvas: Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Diigo, more

So, after a bumpy start (Canvas rejects Twitter widgets), I finally got a good set of dynamic content pages set up in my practice Canvas course. I made it public, so this link will take you there: Growth Mindset Playground. I found a hack to make the Twitter work after all (weird, but functional), plus it's easy to do YouTube, Flickr, Diigo, Blogger, and (my personal favorite!) Inoreader.

I don't really have any interest in using Canvas for a "course," and I don't have any interest in creating content in there, but these live content pages are different. Instead of creating content inside Canvas (I far prefer other publishing platforms), I am creating and curating content in real spaces on the Internet, and that content is then automatically displayed in Canvas. I don't have to do anything: it's automatic!

So, when I use Twitter, the tweets show up in Canvas. When I add a new video to the YouTube playlist, the playlist is updated. When I add new images to the Flickr album, they show up in Canvas. When I bookmark with Diigo, it's in Canvas. New Blogger blog post? It's in Canvas. New RSS items? Inoreader will display them in Canvas, along with other social network content, including Google+ and Facebook.

Some other formats I tried did not work because Canvas rejects javascript. That is frustrating (one of the main reasons I like Blogger is that it is very javascript-friendly), but I'm still very pleased with the live content sources that do work! And, of course, I am very happy that I can make the course pages public so that everybody can see how it works and decide what might be useful for their own Canvas courses.

Why live content?

To me, live content is something extremely important to include in an online course. Using live pages, you give the students a steady stream of new content to explore. This might be content that the instructor(s) create/curate, or you can have the students also participate in creating and/or curating the content as well. It all depends on the goals you have for your course!

In future posts, I'll have more to say about these specific content sources and also about content creation and curation. For now, though, I am really happy that I was able to get all this live content up and running. Even better: I am so glad to be able to share the pages with everybody... that was never possible in D2L!

INOREADER RULES THE WORLD... all-caps of joy

I wanted to try one more Canvas test, and after the dismal Twitter test, I was not optimistic... but look at this: the HTML clippings for an Inoreader RSS feed render without any problem. Isn't that awesome???

So, by using Inoreader's rules and active searches, I will be able to create some seriously awesome dynamic pages in Canvas: live content coming to you from the real Internet. Who needs Twitter when I have RSS???

My worries are over. 

Happy. Details later.

For now, screenshot:

Inoreader and Three Steps to Curation Bliss

Yesterday I wrote up a guide to how to use Inoreoader to create a personal RSS stream: Inoreader: Remix Your Own RSS Feed ... with social network content. You can see my personal stream at MythFolklore.net. As someone who teaches online and who is dedicated to using the Internet as an educational space, I consider that personal stream to be the equivalent of my "open office door" or, if you prefer, my door with all the cartoons and articles and such taped to the door as some faculty do.

Curating the Stream. But here's the thing: the REAL value of that stream is its usefulness for me. It is how I curate all the valuable content I encounter every day. Since going online back in 1998, this is the first time I've ever had a reliable and fun curation process, something that really works. Inoreader was the key: every other curation method that I had tried before, failed... but that all changed in November 2014, when I figured out how to make my personal stream. Thanks to the power of Inoreader search, I can link to the Google+ post where I shared the joy (Google+ search is absymal, but Inoreader solves that problem):

My Inoreader Curation Process

So, here's how the Inoreader curation process works for me...and if you are looking for a better curation process, maybe you can find some strategies here that will work for you too!

Step 1. Create a stream-to-curate folder. I explained yesterday how to create a combination feed by putting feeds in a folder. You can put whatever feeds you want in your stream-to-curate folder! Because I am so active every day at both Google+ and Twitter, sharing and resharing content there very diligently, I can rely on my own Google+ and Twitter streams (I have two Twitter accounts) as the content I want to curate, so my personal stream is also my stream-to-curate. If I were not using those networks so diligently, though, I might include some other people's blogs, Twitter sources, Inoreader active searches, etc. in my stream-to-curate folder. It's all up to you; there are so many ways to add content to a folder in Inoreader!

Step 2. Create rule to assign a tag. I also explained yesterday about how useful it can be to create a rule to add a tag automatically to all new items in a folder. To manage your curation process, create a rule that adds a tag to all the new items in your stream-to-curate folder; the tag I use is notbookmarked. I can also manually add that tag to any item I happen to see in Inoreader, although I am not likely to do that; I usually share good content at Inoreader at Google+ which means it ends up in my stream anyway. But the option to manually add the tag is always available too!

Step 3. CURATE. When you have time (a little time, a lot of time, whenever), review the notbookmarked tag in Inoreader. There is no rush: Inoreader saves the contents patiently; even if you just have time to do this once or twice a month, that's fine. Work through the notbookmarked items, deciding what to do with them in order to get them in a more permanent place IF you want to keep them, re-use them, re-share them, etc. As you process each item, either putting it somewhere else or deciding to discard it (I discard more than I keep), remove the notbookmarked tag. This does not remove it from Inoreader, and it does not remove it from your stream-to-curate folder. Instead, it just removes it from the heap of stuff you have not curated... yet.

And that's all there is to it! There is no rocket science here; all you are doing is setting up a good stream and getting Inoreader to tag it for you so that you can ponder later, at your convenience, what is really worth keeping. So simple: which is why it works!

IFTTT and Inoreader. Depending on where you save the stuff you want to save, you may be able to use Inoreader to further automate that process, creating IFTTT rules for Inoreader that are tag-driven. So, for example, I have a Blogger blog where I keep graphics I want to save — it's called Inoreader Graphics — and everything you see in that blog has been posted automatically by Inoreader. If I have a graphic in an Inoreader item that I want to save, I just add the tag dographic, and then I remove the notbookmarked tag as usual. The IFTTT recipe checks for that dographic tag and publishes the item in my blog. That's just one IFTTT example, of course, and people are using other Inoreader IFTTT recipes as you can see from the public recipes like these:

Limits to Automation. Since I value what I learn from the curation process, I'm not really interested in automating my process beyond that one use of IFTTT. The manual aspect of the process is something I actually enjoy! When I sift through the items at Inoreader, I get to "relive" each day, which is a powerful process in and of itself. I decide what to keep and what to discard, and when I keep things I decide where to put them. The item might go on my Myth-Folklore or Indian Epics or Writing Pinterest Boards, for example, or I might save articles to my Growth Mindset Resources at Diigo, etc. Pinterest and Diigo are both the repositories I turn to when I have more substantial free time, taking items saved there and turning them into blog posts. That process of revisiting items again and again (first at Inoreader and then later at Pinterest and Diigo) allows me to see what has real value to me, with the most valuable stuff ending up in my blogs, and those blogs are, in turn, another way for me to reshare my curated content with others.

Curation Bliss. This curation process all seems so natural and easy now that I have Inoreader to be the foundation for it all, but before Inoreader, I probably lost more content than I kept. And yes, that is very sad — but there's no point crying over digital spilt milk! Now, I keep the best of what I find, with better content to share back with my students than I ever had before. So, once again, I am very grateful to Inoreader. I started out just using it as a tool for my teaching (something to run my student blog hubs)... but it has grown into being the most important tool that I use for keeping track of my life online: THANK YOU, INOREADER! :-)

Inoreader: Remix Your Own RSS Feed ... with social network content

A Twitter convo this morning with Josh Birdwell has prompted me to write up something about how I use Inoreader. I really should try to document more of the ways I use Inoreader because it is now my #1 essential tool both for teaching and for all my own projects. Thanks to Inoreader, I am now curating every day, keeping track of the huge flow of content that I read via my blog network (including student blogs) and also at Twitter and Google+. I'll write more about Inoreader as a curation tool in a separate post; my focus today is on using Inoreader to remix content for an outgoing combination RSS feed.

Remix RSS and More. The ability to remix RSS is very cool (remember YahooPipes?), but Inoreader takes that even farther because it also harvests non-RSS content from social network feeds at Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, rendering them as RSS. It's magic: you can recombine any of the content in Inoreader to send back out as an RSS stream, including social network content that is normally not available as RSS. Want an RSS feed of your Twitter? Facebook? Google+? Easy-peasy: you just subscribe to your feed with Inoreader, and then send it back out again as RSS.

Personal Combo Feed. What I do is actually to COMBINE all my different blog and social network feeds into a single outgoing RSS stream which you can see here on my homepage: MythFolklore.net.

What you see there is an HTML clippings view of the RSS stream (Inoreader offers both RSS and a configurable HTML clippings option); the direct link to the RSS feed is there too. Not that I really expect anyone would want to subscribe to my RSS stream but, hey, they could do that. And if they did, here is what they would get:

Twitter: OnlineCrsLady
Twitter: OnlineMythIndia
my Google+ feed
plus the 11 blogs I actively maintain

I subscribe to these feeds in Inoreader (along with hundreds of other blogs, Twitter feeds, Google+ accounts, plus some Facebook accounts I follow), and I put my own personal feeds in a folder called "Laura Stream" (and a folder is really just a special kind of tag; you can put a feed in multiple folders). So, here is what my personal stream folder looks like in Inoreader:

If I used Facebook (I don't), then I could have my Facebook in there too. There's other online activity I could include as well (other blogs, Diigo, Pinterest, Flickr, YouTube), but for various reasons I have left all that out, although of course I could change my mind about that at any time and add them in by add any of those subscriptions to this folder.

Export the RSS. So, how do I get from that folder of content to my combined RSS feed? I could just export that folder as an RSS feed (you can send out any folder as its own RSS feed), but I add an extra layer of control by using a rule that automatically tags new items in that folder with a tag, lkgrss.

Why add that extra layer of a specific tag? Because it means I can manually remove something from the feed if I want (by deleting the tag from any item) or I can manually add something to the feed (by adding that tag to any item). To be honest, I don't mess with this particular combination feed manually at all, but I got in the habit of using this tag-based approach because of how I use my class blog hubs, and so I used the same approach here too.

The rule system in Inoreader is incredibly powerful and easy to set up; adding a tag to new items in a folder is just one of gazillions of automatic functions you can perform. Based on the rule, for any new item in the folder, Inoreader automatically adds the tag I specify:

Then to export that tag back out as an RSS feed, I just go to that tag in Inoreader (you can browse by feed, folders, or tags), and configure that tag to export:

And that's how I make my personal RSS combination stream using Inoreader.

Personal Streams. As there is now a flurry of interest in personal APIs, I'm eager to see how this RSS-based approach compares to what people are doing with APIs. I see my web work as being basically ephemeral, and this personal RSS stream creates a dynamic but ephemeral presence (in what is almost real time). If anybody wants to see what I am doing online as I work, MythFolklore.net gives a good picture. It's not everything I do, but it sure is a lot of it!

In addition, I'm guessing my use of this stream would also give me a good basis for thinking about what it would mean to shift from this RSS-based feed to something more powerful like a personal API. But that would also be more complicated... and I'll confess the 3-minutes-you're-done simplicity of setting up a combination stream in Inoreader really appeals to me!

I'm not kidding about it taking 3 minutes.

1 minute: add feeds to folder
1 minute: create rule-based tag for folder
1 minute: export tag as RSS

And hey, if you only have 2 minutes instead of 3, you can skip the rule-based tag assignment. :-)

Yes, I love Inoreader. It takes in all the content and then lets me use/reuse, remix, and share... all thanks to the power of RSS. In the next post, I'll explain how it works as a search/curation tool.

February 15: OpenTeachingOU News Update

So, for the #OpenTeachingOU round-up this week, there is some FABULOUS stuff to report. What a great week! And for more, check out the #OpenTeachingOU Omnifeed (thank you, Inoreader!), and also previous news round-ups.

OU Folks

Rob Reynolds, NextThought CPO. Given OU's ginormous investment in NextThought, I thought this should count as "OU Folks," especially since I am so happy about it: Rob Reynolds is now Chief Product Officer at NextThought, and we can see his work already taking effect. They have a real website now, and a real blog!

Faculty Learning Community: Online Presence and Digital Identity. I was THRILLED to see that the upcoming FLC from Adam Croom already has a web presence of its own! I hope to join in even if I cannot participate in the face-to-face.

Domains Do Disney. Adam was also at ELI this week and shared this fantastic blog post with an update on create.ou.edu. There are some faculty blogs here I have to explore, so expect more goodness here in the OU section next week!

Faculty Learning Community: Teaching in a Digital Space. Another great FLC, and one that I hope will leave a digital trail also. Kevin Buck says he will blog it! Yes!!!!!! We need some good Kevin energy for D2L... the John Baker webinar was not exactly a toe-tapper this week (maybe others got something out of it; I listened attentively but had nothing to take away).

President Boren on Twitter. Yes, President Boren has a Twitter account now... so, thanks to the power of the Twitter widget in D2L, President Boren was there to greet my students when they logged in!

Beyond OU

Striving for a Pedagogy of Empowerment: Taking a Leap of Faith. Beautiful piece from Mia Zamora: "A truly wise person learns from every person he or she connects with in the most unforeseen moments. This is of course the soul of co-learning. And, perhaps it is also the seed of equity and justice."

Educators as Lead Learners. More on colearning and making learning visible, this time about our learning as instructors, from Jackie Gerstein, with a great graphic as always!

U.S. Postsecondary Faculty in 2015. This Gates Foundation report has some very discouraging numbers re: faculty and technology but the report itself had some glimmers of hope compared to the short write-up I read in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. (Thanks to Phil Hill for alerting me to check out the actual report.)

NMC Horizon Report. Great comments from Stephen Downes: "So what does it tell us about the methodology? Mostly, that it sways in the breeze. It's strongly influenced by the popular press and marketing campaigns. It's not based on a deep knowledge significant technology developments, but rather focuses on surface-level chatter and opinion. And that is why I think NMC should be obligated to re-examine its methodology."

Before You Assign That Homework — What Students Wish You Knew. Great post from Pernille Ripp with much for higher ed here too. I am esp. a fan of the strategy that we should be doing our own homework.

Critical Digital Pedagogy. Beautiful and very thought-provoking slides from Jesse Stommel.

Critical Digital Pedagogy from Jesse Stommel

My Stuff

Ugh: That Grading Article in Chronicle Vitae. Terrible and depressing article, but at least it led to a good conversation re: very important topic of grading.

Data Schmata: Midterm Grade Reports. Yep, no comments. Again. It's big data deja vu all over again!

Making Learning Visible: Power of Past Student Work. Preliminary report on the way availability of Portfolios from last semester is changing things BIG TIME in my classes this semester; I'll have more on this next week.

Pinterest Project Boards. Excited to have Pinterest Project Boards running now, and I embedded them in the Project Directories for both classes!

Student Project Comments. Exciting week coming up: students begin commenting on each other's projects. I've revamped that assignment and am hoping for even better things than in past!

Student Schedule Update. I'm continuing my "small data" project for the semester, seeing what more I can do to get students to develop their own schedules instead of doing work based on my (arbitrary) deadlines.

Inoreader Dashboard. I am so happy with my new strategy for using Inoreader's Dashboard options!

Comment Walls. Some students come up with fun graphics for their Comment Walls (they are setting up those Comment Walls this week, getting ready for comments to come). Here's one that is very fun indeed:

January 25: OpenTeachingOU News Update

Okay, it is always a colossal effort to get a new class up and running every semester. I keep making changes to the course materials (the students keep giving me so many good ideas to try!), and then there's the real effort: connecting with and getting to know all the new students, helping them to get online and start blogging, etc. I'm amazed and happy at what we have accomplished in the past two weeks, and I think the students are also very pleased — as usual, for almost all the students, it is the first time they have had a blog, and that really can be exciting... I still get excited when I make a new blog after all those years!

All that work, though, really wrecks the rest of my online life: reading, writing, keeping track of things. Luckily, though, I put a new content development plan in place that has kept me more-or-less on track, so I am REALLY happy about that. Even in the midst of all this work, I've made huge progress on the Indian Epics UnTextbook, and I've kept on publishing stories at Ocean of Stories (I finally got started on the jataka part of that project just yesterday), and I've managed to carry on with the Bestiaria Latina faithfully. At Twitter, I'm being really diligent about keeping up with following OU people (but I have not really kept up with anything else), and I've done a good job with the class Twitter stream too. In the blogosphere, I am hopelessly behind, and I have barely been keeping up even with what people are sharing at Google+. Luckily, though, both Twitter and Google+ are very forgiving and starting this week I should be able to get back into the swing of things!

What may save me, though, is this use of the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag. I'm not able to write up a news round-up today (I'm too far behind!), but I can do an #OpenTeachingOU round-up... which is better than nothing ha ha. Meanwhile, you can watch the #OpenTeachingOU feed over here on its own page, thanks to the power of the Inoreader omnifeed: Laura Gibbs - #OpenTeachingOU.

So, in order to write this OpenTeachingOU round-up, all I have to do is scroll through that HTML clippings feed, grab the best items, and add a little context. Even in the midst of chaos, that is something I can manage to do, and I think I've had #OpenTeachingOU stuff every day. I really didn't intend the use of this hashtag for my own housekeeping, but it has sure proved very useful for that. And, thanks to Cody Taylor this weekend, I am hoping that maybe ... maybe ... other OU folks will start using it as well!

Meanwhile, the notes below go back to my very first use of the hashtag. Maybe I'll be able to do bigger/better news round-ups as the semester settles down, but if I can manage to do this in the midst of chaos thanks to the hashtag, that's good enough for now. :-)

OU News:

Thank you, Cody! I was so excited that Cody Taylor used the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag for a post, and very appropriately since it was re: the very generous way in which Katherine Pandora and the DH crew are putting course materials online! (see next item)

Katherine Pandora Digital Humanities Intro. At Twitter, I learned about Katherine Pandora's DH class. Very exciting: course materials, group blogs, student blogs... such a fantastic use of create.ou.edu!

PR Pubs Goes Online! Another other great create.ou.edu experiment I learned about via Twitter is Adam Croom's PR Pubs course. You can read details here in his blog.

David Vishanoff. And via Twitter I learned about David Vishanoff blogging and teaching in the open: yes!!!

OUTechExpo. This is a link to the Twitter stream for OUTechExpo... not much Twitter, but something is better than nothing. Will the Jim Groom magic last? Will it have pulled some people into the world of open? It was Jim's visit to campus that prompted me to start using #OpenTeachingOU...!

Beyond OU:

Dealing with the Blog Flow. Fantastic post from Alan Levine about blog flow management. So fascinating to hear how other people work with this! A note about my blog workflow here and here.

How Interactive is Your Online Course? Self-Assess with this Rubric. Very helpful post from Debbie Morrison.

A shift in education: Teachers who create content, not consume. I learned about this great blog post (interview with Stephen O'Connor) via Twitter.

New Feature at Wikimedia. Helping to raise people's awareness of image sources, licenses, and citations.

21st Century Skills and Attributes. A nifty self-assessment from Jackie Gerstein.

9 Barriers to Personalized Learning And How We May Work Around Them. Very powerful and useful post from Pernille Ripp.

Modern Learning Routines. Great graphic from Silvia Tolisano via Twitter:

Teaching and Scholarship. I loved this quote from Jesse Stommel at Twitter: The scholarship OF teaching should not be limited to scholarship ABOUT teaching. Teaching is itself scholarly and a product of research.

Teach While You're At It. And on that subject, Stephen Landry has a very nice piece about teaching and research in the Chronicle.

My Blog Posts:

Indian Epics UnTextbook: Table of Contents Emerging. I am going to try to do a better job of documenting the UnTextbook this time around, esp. since I learned a lot from my mistakes with Myth-Folklore UnTextbook last time! :-)

Hashtags for curation: Saved by #OpenTeachingOU. More about this hashtag thing is working for me.

Martin Luther King Day Edition. I spent most of the day on Sunday learning more about Martin Luther King in honor of Martin Luther King Day on Monday... and making quote posters — and I ended up with about 50 of them! My favorite quote: We must always maintain a kind of divine discontent. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ten Reasons for Week Zero (a.k.a. Soft Start). Wow, Week Zero seems like forever ago! But here is a blog post about how important it is.

My Google+ Quasi-Blog:

Siren Song of the Deadline. Thoughts on student autonomy, and lack thereof. The ringing of the bell: Pavlov warned us about that, didn't he???!

Indian Epics Overview. I am super-happy with the changes I made to this Overview activity in Indian Epics; results so much better than last semester!

Writing Assessment: Spring 2015. The ritual update from yours truly about how the proofreading assessment went this semester. Very consistent with past semesters and, as always, I am glad to have engaged with the students re: this dimension of the class already in Week 1.

Peer Comments. I'm trying out a new series of assignments to help students develop better commenting skills. So far, so good with the first assignment!

Reading Diaries: Happy Update. I'm really pleased with tweaks to reading diary instructions. Overall, diaries definitely better this time already starting in the first week of reading: more reflection, less plot summary.

UnTextbook Reporting. And the Google Form with student feedback on the UnTextbook is filling up... with the new extra reading option, I should get feedback on a lot more units this semester!

Why I Love My Job. Just one of many great moments thanks to student blog posts... and also here and here.

Helping Students with Blog Post Images. Yes, it is worth getting into the nitty-gritty of details like this students, esp. when they run into problems with broken images as a result of remote linking.

Inoreader Update. I am SO PLEASED with the way Inoreader now updates items. That is a huge help with my students, esp. as they are revising blogs early in the semester in process of learning ins-and-outs of blogging.

Pinterest Experiment. Update on Pinterest experiment: going great!

Reading a Powerpoint Aloud. Extended and very lively discussion erupted at G+ from Stacy Zemke's share of this meme!

Notes from the Twitterverse:

Tweets about Pinterest experiment: here, here, here, etc.

Tweets about D2L Twitter widget integration: here, here, here, etc.

Hashtags for curation: Saved by #OpenTeachingOU

Well, it is time to pause and say: WOW!!!!!!!!! The semester has gotten off to a fantastic start for me. I am seriously overenrolled in my classes (usually about 10% of people who are enrolled drop, and I plan on that... but, yikes, that has not happened this semester, so I am still at over 90 students right now)... but thanks to Inoreader and other improvements in my work flow, I think I should be able to cope. And it is going to be so exciting having all these people blogging, writing stories, sharing ideas. So many great students as always.

But........ BUSY. That overenrollment is definitely going to eat into the time I might normally have available for blogging and stuff.

Which is why I am so glad that I started using the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag.

In honor of Jim Groom and the Academic Tech Expo we had here earlier this month, I started using an #OpenTeachingOU hashtag at Twitter, at Google+, and also at my blogs, hoping that might be a way for those of us who are into open teaching to connect up with one another. That has not happened yet (although there was a seriously awesome post from Adam Croom in that spirit!) ... but even just using the hashtag for MY OWN CURATION has proved really useful. I haven't had any time to do any posting at this blog for the past week or so, but the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag does provide a glimpse into what I am thinking about and how things are going this semester so far!

I've created an #OpenTeachingOU OmniFeed page which shows all my posts with the tag (Google+, Twitter, blogs... and Pinterest too... although I don't think I've pinned anything for open teaching yet), and you can also see a standard Twitter hashtag widget in the sidebar of this blog. Isn't that cool? I love the way I can create these "omnifeeds" with Inoreader thanks to their Google+ and Twitter integration!

So, for those of you who are not interested in my Latin LOLCats and stories from India and random blah-blah-blah-whatever that shows up in my feed, the #OpenTeachingOU Omnifeed is for you, ha ha. It is a glimpse into my teaching eurekas... and a promise of blog posts to come.

Hashtags: they are powerful!

And I saw this infographic about history of hashtags thanks to Ian O'Byrne over at Google+ today. To be honest, hashtags kind of suck at Google+ (even if I am one of Google+'s biggest fans)... but I do use #OpenTeachingOU there too, in hopes that Google+ hashtag culture might improve.

And someday........ someday.......... I will get up on all the posts I am behind at this blog, ha ha.

Update on #OpenTeachingOU Hashtag: Happy!

So, just a quick post here to say that I am really happy with this hashtag I have started using, #OpenTeachingOU. Given the hectic time at the beginning of the semester, with all the work I'm doing to get ready for classes, I haven't had time to be keeping up with my news rounds-ups, etc., but the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag is a way that I can label tweets and posts and items at Google+ so that they don't get lost in my online space which is full of teaching stuff, yes, but also full of LOLCats and Indian images etc. etc. So, the hashtag is proving to be a really good way for me to think about open teaching as I participate in these online spaces each day, and that is a good thing to be thinking about!

I'm also REALLY grateful to know about the ClassicRetweet extension for both Chrome and Firefox since that allows me to add the hashtag when I retweet. :-)

Of course, most of all I am hoping... especially after Jim Groom came and worked his magic at the Tech Expo on Friday... that the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag might catch on! There are all kinds of people and programs at OU that are moving, slowly or quickly, in the direction of open teaching and connected learning, so in addition to just using it for my own curation purposes, I'll also keep hoping that the hashtag will serve a more social purpose too.

Below is the HTML clippings feed for the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag via Inoreader (see it on a page of its own ... and here's the RSS). That's a bit different than the widget in the sidebar of this blog: in the sidebar, you are just seeing the Twitter stream for the hashtag, but Inoreader is pulling anything with #OpenTeachingOU, which means all the blogs I am subscribed to, plus my Google+ stream, along with Twitter. Inoreader searches through all that stuff with a rule I created, and then it combines the matching results into a new consolidated RSS feed.  Plus, I can add that label manually to items I find in Inoreader myself if I want to pull them into the RSS feed for OpenTeachingOU. So powerful! I am really enjoying the different uses I find for Inoreader, and this is a good one. :-)

Some Thoughts on Blog Hubs: What are they for anyway?

Adam Croom was kind enough to do a quick hangout video that provides a walkthrough of how the FeedWordPress plugin is integrated into the create.ou.edu network (Domain of One's Own pilot) that we are running at my school. Although I was not invited to use create.ou.edu for my classes (only a few faculty were included in the original invitation), I do have an individual account there now, and I am going to play around with FeedWordPress this spring to see how I can use it for my classes. So, even though my students are not using WordPress at create.ou.edu, I can still go ahead and set up my own WordPress blog as a syndication hub and subscribe to my students' blogs (hopefully via an OPML file, since that sure will be easier than subscribing one by one). I'd definitely like to learn more about how this WordPress approach to syndication works. In fact, seeing Adam's demo got me to thinking about how a WordPress hub could complement Inoreader since they really are very different. Just as a broad generalization, the WordPress hub looks like it will be great for design and presentation, while Inoreader is more of a data management tool, admittedly not so strong on presentation and design.

Hubs and goals. For my classes, the data management side is what is really essential, so let me explain how that works in terms of the goals for my classes. Overall, I have two big goals: one goal is for me to interact with my students via their blogs and the other goal is for the students to interact with each other via their blogs. Obviously, those goals are very similar, but there is one factor that makes them very different: scale. Each student interacts with just a few other students each week... but I like to interact with everybody!

Random for students. Here's how that works for students: each week the students interact with other students in class via randomly assigned blog groups and randomly assigned Project groups (three people in each group, all totally random). It's really simple to do this: I have a list of the students' blog addresses and also a list of their Project Comment Wall addresses (raw HTML with clickable links), and I use an online randomizer to randomize those lists each week. I then divide the randomized list up into sets of three and, presto, groups! It takes me about 10 minutes each week to set up the blog groups and the Project groups for both classes: easy-peasy. Thanks to the power of random, every student gets comments every week, while slowly but surely they all get to know each other, even in my big class (Myth-Folklore has around 50-60 while Indian Epics is around 30). They also have some free choices in the blog commenting and Project commenting, so as they make friends in the class, they can also follow the same person's work from week to week too.

For all that interaction to happen, I don't use a blog hub; the list of links and the randomizer is all I need. The power of random is the essential factor here: I don't want expect the students to be monitoring ALL the blogs (that's my job; see below). Instead, I just want the students to read blogs at random, and that way I can feel confident that the overall level of interaction in the class is really high AND well distributed. Also, since the students do such a great job of customizing their blogs (choosing a design, adding content to the sidebar), I really want them to interact in those individual blog spaces, not in the generic sameness of a syndicated hub.

Systematic for me. My situation, though, is completely different. I cannot afford to just interact with the students at random... because I really am a very hands-on teacher. And yes, I am pretty obsessive, ha ha. I want to see EVERYTHING that is happening in my classes, partly because I want to make sure everything is going well and also because I totally enjoy all of it — I love seeing what my students are creating every day! So, that means I am watching 80-90 blogs (and that may actually be close to 100 this semester since I am seriously overenrolled), with about 5 posts per student per week. I don't comment on all those posts of course, but I do like to glance at them, and I comment as needed and as time allows (my main way of interacting with students is through their Projects, though - which are separate from the blogs). In particular, I need to comment when there might be a problem with a blog post (for example, some students try remote linking to Pixabay images, etc. - little technical glitches like that). I also like to keep an eye on the comments, and there are hundreds of comments every week — very fun to watch: the students are so positive and helpful with all that. Here's what that comment stream looked like last semester for example.

So, when I say that Inoreader provides the blog hub for my class, it is the blog hub for my use mostly, not so much a blog hub that the students use (instead, the students are just using the random groups to visit blogs, and also finding their friends in the blog directory).

Inoreader for assignments. There is one way, however, in which Inoreader really is important for my students, and that is in the way that it can push out SPECIFIC assignments based on the assignment-specific tags that are automatically assigned to incoming posts. Every folder and every tag in Inoreader becomes an RSS feed of its own with an HTML clippings view. That means I can share the HTML view of a given assignment back with the students. In terms of helping students to get an idea of how each assignment works, this is so valuable! Some students are good at reading instructions, but other students do so much better when they can see concrete examples of an assignment... and Inoreader lets me share a stream of examples back with the students for every assignment.

You can see how that works here in the very first blog post assignment for the class: Favorite Places instructions. As always, I provide detailed instructions (yes, insanely detailed instructions...), but I also provide a link to student posts. Right now the link is going to student posts from last semester, but as soon as I get a few of these favorite places posts from Spring semester, I'll change the HTML clipping stream that is embedded here, and that way students will see the latest posts from their fellow students in the class: Favorite Places posts. Being able to see those posts from other students is a great supplement to the actual instructions and, even more importantly, it shows how everybody's post is just different from all the other posts. There's no right/wrong and no sameness about this experience... instead, it's just a fun and friendly way to start getting to know each other as the semester begins.

So, I love how tags and folders let me re-use specific assignments this way in Inoreader. One of the things I want to explore with FeedWordPress is whether I can get that same assignment-level specificity without having to do a lot of manual work. Right now with Inoreader, there are automatic rules that tag the individual assignments as they come in, and that tagging process is about 99% accurate; every once in a while I had to manually add a tag because a student used a very funky post title that my Inoreader rule did not recognize.

With assignment streams on the fly! I can also go through on the fly and add specific tags to instantly create a content stream as needed. For example, in the first storytelling post of the semester, students choose whether to do an Aesop's fable of their own, a nursery rhyme, or an urban legend type of story. The nursery rhyme is probably the most unusual since nursery rhymes do not always have a story plot in the traditional sense. So, right now at this very moment I am going to go through and quickly tag all the first week storytelling posts that used nursery rhymes last Fall (I didn't use that tag originally; I'm adding it now), and that tag-stream will be a resource for students this Spring who want to try a nursery rhyme story ... (pause for about five minutes where I quickly go through last semester's first week storytelling posts, which is easy to do thanks to the tag in Inoreader) ...

And here it is: the Inoreader tag "rhymeF14" that I can now share with my students. Click on that link and see the stories! That's the HTML clippings view for that tag.

Pretty nifty, isn't it? You can see what wonderful stuff the students are doing, already in the first week of the semester. Some students, of course, are hesitant in the first week of class since they might not have done any creative writing since back in elementary school. All they need, though, is just a little encouragement — and seeing other students' work is the single best form of encouragement there is, IMO. Just look at Sir Eyes-Egg Newton, for example: wow! It makes me want to go play with some nursery rhymes right now myself! Here is Sir Eyes-Egg in the Inoreader stream:

And here is Sir Eyes-Egg in a blog of his own (the titles of the posts are links to the original blog posting, so you can see the blog context any time you are curious):

Very happy! So, that's a take on how I use Inoreader: it is great for managing the day-to-day and week-to-week blog posts as they come in... while also being flexible enough for me to do little projects on the fly like this, collecting a specific content stream to reshare for some ad hoc purpose, all in just a few minutes. I could not have dreamed up a better tool for the things I like to do in creating these online classes. And I promise more to come as I get ready for Spring and, even better, when the students themselves start blogging!

How to follow my Spring 2015 Inoreader adventures

For people who are interested in following my Inoreader process for managing the student blog network in my two classes, I'm going to try to document that in EXCRUCIATING detail this semester ha ha. Last semester, I found Inoreader just in the nick of time for class but too late for any real documentation. This time around, though, I want to do a good job with this for all kinds of reasons:

* documenting for myself: I know I made some strategic mistakes in Fall semester, so I want to do better in Spring, and I also want to leave a trail so that I can do even better next year too!
* documenting for others: I am sure that Inoreader is a very powerful tool for any teacher who wants to engage with students using blogs, but it's not necessarily obvious just how to do that - I'm still figuring it out as I go along!
* documenting for Inoreader: I am so impressed by the support I've received from the nice people at Inoreader, and I hope that by sharing with them exactly how I am using this amazing tool, it can add to their understanding of the user experience.

So, here is how I will do that:

Google+ posts. Google+ is the quickest, easiest place for me to post during the workday, and it's also my favorite place for dialogue/sharing online. It's my "thinking out loud" space, so it will be the main place I post these observations for now.

Twitter #InoreaderS15. When I post at Google+ or post here at my blog, I'll use the #InoreaderS15 hashtag.

OUDigitools. When I post here at this blog, I'll use the InoreaderS15 label too.

Teaching with Inoreader. Slowly but surely, I'll add more material to my Teaching with Inoreader site, although in the hectic days of getting ready for class, I may be slower to write things up there.

Inoreader. And, of course, Inoreader will let me tag all these items and push them back on in a single stream which you can subscribe to by RSS — a stream that will combine my blog posts, tweets, and Google+ posts all in one place (yes, Inoreader really is amazing!). Here's how that RSS feed looks in Firefox; I wish all browsers rendered RSS in such a pretty way:

In addition to the RSS feed from Inoreader, you can also see it as an HTML clipping page: whoo-hoo! I've set that up to display 100 items on the clipping page, so it really should give you the whole thing at a single glance, all in once place (this way of compiling related content on a single page is another one of my favorite things about Inoreader).

Is anybody else having an Inoreader adventure this spring? If you want to use that hashtag to share your documentation also at Twitter, that would be super, and if you are blogging somewhere, let me know and I'll snag your blog posts and pop them into my InoreaderS15 stream from Inoreader.

RSS: it really IS a superpower! :-)

(Pixabay)

Happy Thoughts about Inoreader and Blog Hubs

There has been a nice chain of Connected Courses blog posts and Twitter convos about the notion of "blog hubs" and the technologies of connection (see Alan Levine's Over Easy to pick up on the chain of posts). That emerging conversation is very good timing for me as I review my use of Inoreader as a connecting tool for my class blog network next semester. I discovered Inoreader in the nick of time last semester to make good use of it this Fall, and now for Spring I hope to do an even better job. Alan's post invokes the idea of "information flow" — It’s not necessarily the “easy” syndicating that compels me, it’s a glimmer of a new. novel way of thinking about the locus of our activity, and how the web mention technology offers a more than singular information flow — which is exactly why Inoreader is important to me. Right now, my students all have their blogs and most of them also have a website-based project... and the key for me is to get all that information flowing from one person to another so that we can all be learning from each other and helping each other by providing good, timely feedback.

FLOW FOR INSTRUCTOR

Overview of student blogs. I need a quick way to look at all the blog posts as they are published to make sure everything is going well, esp. at the beginning of the semester. Some things I keep an eye out for:
- questions or concerns students might express that need a response from me
- problems with images and image citations (that is something new to most students)
- other technical problems that might come up (formatting links, blog post labels)
Best of all, of course, I am looking for students having fun and doing great stuff so that I can chime in with enthusiasm! Inoreader is a fantastic tool for this; I subscribe to all the students' blogs and I check Inoreader periodically all day long for new posts as they come in. I set up Inoreader to label them as "incoming" and I remove that label as I glance through each post. I comment as much as time allows.

Overview of blog comments. Keeping an eye on student comments is important too, and because I can subscribe to the comment feeds at my students' blogs as well as to the post feeds, I am able to use Inoreader in the same way for comments as I do for posts. Last semester, there was never a problem with a comment (as a rule, students are incredibly helpful and supportive in their comments), and I am delighted to report that there was no spam at all. Yet even though I am confident that all is well, it is incredibly important to me that the comments should be a good experience and that spam should be dealt with immediately, so I really do keep an eye on the comments as they come in, just to make 100% sure. Plus, it is fun and very energizing to see all the good comments students are leaving on each other's blogs.

FLOW FOR STUDENTS

This is much more variable as students have different needs and desires. My goal is to create a rich network of sharing that will satisfy that range of needs and desires. I want students to feel part of an ongoing, active, exciting class writing experience all semester long... and Inoreader is a big help with that.

Sharing assignment-specific examples. This is my favorite thing about Inoreader! As student blog posts come in, Inoreader can label them automatically by assignment (assuming students include key word in blog post title which they mostly do, and I can manually add the assignment label when that does not happen automatically). Each Inoreader label is an RSS feed of its own, with an HTML clippings view. That means I can redisplay the student assignments... which is the absolute best way I know to help students who are feeling uncertain or confused about an assignment. Especially for creative writing, seeing other people's creativity is a perfect way to unleash your own creative powers! Here's an example of how that works for a really important assignment, the first storytelling assignment they do in class: Week 1 Storytelling posts.

For each assignment, I am able to use Inoreader to provide an RSS/HTML stream of posts for that specific assignment. Here is a screenshot of the Inoreader tool that configures the HTML clippings view for any given label/folder:

Class "bundles" of blogs. This is something I will be doing in Spring that I did not do last Fall. Inoreader allows you to create blog bundles, so I will make a bundle of the blogs for each class, and that will allow people to see the overall blog flow in much the same way that I do. For example, here is what a bundle looks like for the Indian Epics class: Indian Epics Inoreader Bundle.

That is the "card view," and you can click on the link and see the different "views" in Inoreader even if you are not an Inoreader user. Of course, Inoreader prompts you to log on and subscribe, and since the free version of Inoreader is a powerful tool, I will be encouraging my students to sign up and use it next semester, hoping to get them excited about using Inoreader to subscribe to and manage online content. I'm really not sure how many students will be interested in following the class this way or in broadening their web horizons, but I definitely intend to teach them how to do that if they want to give it a try!

Of course, Inoreader is not the only way that information flows in the class. My daily class announcements (a blog) are a key component of the information flow, as is our class Twitter feed along with the class Pinterest Boards (both my Boards and the students' own Boards too). What's great, though, is that because Inoreader can harvest the class announcements and Twitter and Pinterest, that means it can re-distribute that information over again. I'll write some more about that in another post.

So, yes, there is lots to say, and I've got a site going where I will be documenting my Inoreader use in detail for the coming semester (Teaching with Inoreader), but I wanted to get these examples out there as my contribution to the discussion of what is easy/hard about blog hubs.

The technology side of Inoreader is very easy: the students set up their blogs, and I subscribe to their blogs and to the comments, putting them in folders (details). I set up the rules that automatically assign labels to different assignments. Inoreader automatically creates RSS feeds and HTML clippings for all folders and for all labels. None of that takes any real time or effort, so I think that qualifies as easy.

Here's what is not easy: deciding to do all this! Because, yes, it is extra work and extra responsibility to set up a class this way and design the assignments with sharing as both the process and goal. So, the technology is easy... it's the actual teaching that is hard. Or, rather, it can be hard. I wouldn't say this is really hard for me because I love it so much; being able to interact with my students like this is a complete pleasure, allowing me to be the kind of teacher I always wanted to be but could never manage in the traditional classroom. I feel really lucky to have discovered Inoreader since it has given me new ways to pursue those goals with new opportunities for my students to share their work with one another. But I hasten to add: I was taking this same approach back when I first got started with student blogs and websites over ten years ago, using Bloglines as my aggregator. So, as long as we have the open Internet for sharing, I know the class can succeed, but I am also glad that Inoreader is helping me find new ways to keep up with my students while helping my students keep up with each other, seeing all the great stuff that goes on all semester long in the class!

Quick post about my Pinterest process for class

As I mentioned in a post yesterday, the discovery that Pinterest has RSS feeds has given me some big ideas about how to make better use of Pinterest in my classes next semester — Co-Learning: Bookmarking and Sharing with Pinterest. So, I'm trying to build in some systematic Pinterest routines as I work with the students on their projects, and I wanted to write that up quickly here since I just started reading a new page at a student's Storybook. Here's my routine for pinning when I am reading and responding to students' new story pages:

1. Pin story. I pin the new story to the class Board for the Storybooks. This is a semester-specific Board where each story gets pinned. I have gotten in the habit of manually pasting in the link in addition to the way Pinterest automatically links via the image. Here is the story I just pinned at the Myth-Folklore Fall 2014 Board; it's the story of the nymph Minthe.

2. Pin resource. Often, but not always, there is some kind of related resource that I can pin to the general class Board which is a Board where I pin all kinds of stuff that might be of interest to students in that particular class: Myth-Folklore Portfolio. In this case, I pinned the Wikipedia article about the mint plant which contains a section on the etymology of "mint" and its connection to Greek mythology.

3. Inoreader. Since I am subscribed to both of these boards via Inoreader, that means the new pins show up automatically at Inoreader, where I can send them back out into the world either via RSS or through an HTML clipping display, as you can see here at my consolidated feed.

So, there's lots more to say here about how I hope to be using Pinterest more next semester, but I wanted to take just a minute to document my process right now. I was not systematic about my use of Pinterest earlier in the semester, but now that I can use RSS to both harvest and then redistribute my Pinterest activity, that gives me a real incentive to make Pinterest a part of how I work every day as I read and respond to the great stories my students are including in their projects.

HAPPY.

Co-Learning: Bookmarking and Sharing with Pinterest

I just posted a new item at my Anatomy of an Online Course blog which is relevant to the Co-Learning unit: Spring 2015 - Pinterest Plans. In that post, I explain how I plan to add Pinterest Boards to the shared "space" where my online classes take place.

The spaces the students use right now — blogs and websites — are writing-intensive spaces, which makes sense because I teach writing classes! At the same time, I'd like to create a bookmarking-and-sharing space that will bring out into the open other important things that students do in the class, in addition to their written work. The Pinterest Boards will be a way for them to share their favorite parts of the reading each week, and it will also be a way for them to document their interactions with other students in the class. I also hope the Pinterest Boards will be a place where they will also document their research activities for the class, sharing materials they find exciting and/or fun and/or useful.

In the past, I had tried to get students about using Diigo, but that never went anywhere. Diigo is incredibly powerful, but it really is not fun to use. Pinterest, on the other hand, while not being powerful in the way Diigo is, can be incredibly fun... and the fun factor is huge here! I would love to get students used to the idea of bookmarking, curating, and sharing, and I think Pinterest is the fun and easy way to do that.

So, the more I think about this, the more excited I get. My own experience with Pinterest has been super-positive. I first got interested in Pinterest because it has some very nice widgets (I love widgets!), and now that I have discovered Pinterest RSS, I am sure this can be a really useful tool for my RSS approach to class management — thanks to that incredibly powerful RSS tool, Inoreader. For details, see the blog post, and I am so glad I have formulated this idea now; the next two weeks of Connected Courses will be a great way to ponder this some more and develop it in greater detail! Whoo-hoo!!!

Here are some screenshots of the Storybook Boards for my classes this semester: Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics. :-)