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 Blogs – the most popular systems for authoring and managing micro-content – have the affordance to become an integral part of teaching and learning processes as a vehicle for knowledge management. Open, flexible systems integrating logs provide user-friendly, personalised microlearning environments while ensuring ubiquitous access. The iCamp project aims at creating an infrastructure for collaboration and networking across systems, countries, and disciplines in higher Education. This virtual environment is composed of various interoperable tools and platforms. One of the key elements, a so-called building block, in this entirely heterogeneous space is a blogging tool.
D3.3 concentrates on blog interoperability in the context of creating such an open space for learning and collaboration. As blogging is one of the most popular web-based forms of publishing today, there is a plethora of different blogging tools, feed readers, and aggregators, enabling information dissemination, filtering, and retrieval. Several different data structure and interaction standards emerged which makes integration a real challenge. This paper presents the possibility of creating distributed microlearning environments basing on networks of integrated blogs, discusses problems of such an integration along with possible solutions, and proposes an architecture for loosely-coupled blog integration.
Furthermore, it documents the prototype of this infrastructure. The core of this infrastructure consists of an application programming interface (API) for feed management that allows learners as well as facilitators to automatically set up channel structures for feed syndication and effectively reducing the management efforts thereof through proper system support. These channels and the management thereof is common to all scenarios which have been elaborated in the second section: they are necessary to initiate subscription procedures that allow to share and communicate about feeds sources (‘simple feed management scenario’); they form the basis for rip, mix, and feed activities; they are a way how to (technically) realise group blogs; and finally they are a necessary prerequisite when realising learning contracts and records of action in a distributed learning environment. You want to test it? Get your own trial blog here.
The originally planned title of this deliverable was ‘Specification of Application Programming Interface for Distributed Collaboration and Social Instruction and Prototype of Collaboration Network’. As the proposed infrastructure is capable of serving many more purposes besides blog integration – as long as the data to be syndicated can be wrapped into common feed standards as RSS 2.0 or ATOM –, the authors have decided to rename the deliverable to ‘An Interoperability Infrastructure for Distributed Feed Networks’.
Figure 1. FeedBack in Action (WordPress).
You can download the current release of this WordPress module here. You can register your own WordPress blog without charge here (don’t forget to go to > plugins < and activate the FeedBack plugin).
– Fridolin Wild
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