Presentation in MUPPLE 10 workshop, 29 September 2010, Barcelona.

1. Aggregating Student Blogs with
EduFeedr: Lessons Learned
from the First Tryouts
Hans Põldoja, Pjotr Savitski, Mart Laanpere
Tallinn University

2. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California,
94105, USA.

3. (massive) open online
courses

8. Learning environment

9. Learning content
link
link and tag
link and tag Course wiki and blog
link
link and tag
link link
Student blogs
RSS

10. Problem

11. How to follow and support
learning activities which cross
the borders of different Web
2.0 applications?

12. Vision

16. Requirements and limitations
• support for all major blogging platforms using open
standards (RSS, Atom, trackback, pingback)
• no special plug-ins should be required on the student blogs
• the scope of EduFeedr is limited with aggregating and
annotating the feeds from both teacher’s and students’
PLE’s and visualizing the process of knowledge building
• only teacher has an user account in EduFeedr, which allows
her to modify the EduFeedr settings
• anyone has read access to aggregated course content

17. Related works

18. gRSShopper

19. BIM

20. Design methodology

21. Design methodology
• Lightweight prototyping
• Scenario-based design
• Participatory design sessions
• User stories
• Paper prototyping

22. Current
implementation of
EduFeedr

23. http://www.edufeedr.net

31. Downloads
• OPML file with blog posts feeds
• OPML file with blog comments feeds
• vCard file for Address Book
• Tab separated file with social network data

32. Technical
implementation

33. Blogs
User
Crontab initiated
aggregation of
REQUEST with credentials content
EduFeedr EduSuckr
front-end WSDL / SOAP back-end service
RESPONSE with data
MySQL /
MySQL
InnoDB

34. Development platform
• EduFeedr is developed as Elgg plugin
• SimplePie PHP library is used for aggregating feeds
• JSViz JavaScript library is used for social network
visualization
• NuSOAP toolkit for PHP

35. Open source

36. Lessons learned

37. Locating the Comments Feed
• Comments feed location is not always specified in
the web page
• Currently we support only Blogger and WordPress
• Possible solutions:
- Specifying the comments feed location for major
blogging platforms
- Adding the comments feed manually

38. Linking Student Posts with the
Assignments
• Methods
- Link to the assignment post in the course blog
- Assignment deadline
- Asking from the facilitator
• In the first course 10 posts from 91 contained the
exact link

39. Linking Comments with the
Participants
• URL in the comment metadata is used to link the
comment with a participant
• Comment meta URL’s in the first course (100 comments):
- participants’ blog in the course (3)
- Blogger profile URL (57)
- URL in the WordPress user profile (18)
- OpenID URL (7)
- No URL (15)

40. Only Recent Items are Stored
in the Syndication Feeds
• Blogger feeds contain 25 most recent items
• WordPress feeds contain 10 most recent items

41. Conclusions and future
work

42. User testing
• User testing in Tallinn University: 4 courses running
• Think aloud usability testing

43. Future work
• Aggregating recent content from various Web 2.0
services
• Providing visualization widgets for external web
sites
• Archiving the course posts and comments

44. Ideas
• Using EduFeedr visualizations for centralized/
closed LMS
• Using EduFeedr for TEL researchers’ blogs

45. Thank You!
• hans.poldoja@tlu.ee
• http://www.slideshare.net/hanspoldoja
• http://www.edufeedr.net