A Domain of One’s Own to Community Syndication Hubs

I will be heading up to Boston this weekend thanks to Philipp Schmidt and Claudia Caro Sullivan who are hosting an open learning hackathon at MIT. Below is the proposal I submitted for an idea I would like to pursue conceptually and actually—what do you think? Tim Owens has already been working at some of this with Installatron, and I wonder if there is a better time than now to start figuring out how you create a community out of a variety of distributed, loosely connected domains.

How do we start thinking of information architecture that allows students and faculty to control their work (a la UMW’s Domain of One’s Own) and feed it cleanly into a distributed campus publishing environment? I hope to talk and work with people around an idea of revisiting and framing a suite of tools that might be bundled (like Commons-in-a-Box)  to make syndication hubs for online courses, communities, and even institutions that much more porous, open, and affordable. A perect example of this can be seen in ds106 or Alec Couros’ etmooc, thanks to the work of Martha Burtis and Alan Levine.

What’s more, I think the time is right to examine what it might mean if universities invest in open frameworks that they can customize and share as part of designing learning environments that meet the needs of a wide range of schools that are experimenting with digitally enhanced, hybrid, and online learning as a result of the recent push towards exploring these spaces. I still think their is gold in the hills of Jon Udell’s ongoing vision of a loosely coupled web of professional identities that we can link together and make discoverable as an engaged communities through aggregation, and I want to see if I am alone or not.

Now what say you?

Update: I was totally remiss in my first go round for not mentioning the recent, awesome work martin Hawksey is doing with syndication, aggregation, and a syndication-driven MOOC platform. He deserves a lot of credit for getting us that much closer!

 

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3 Responses to A Domain of One’s Own to Community Syndication Hubs

  1. Alan Levine says:

    I’m excited you are part of this event, having Philipp at MIT gives me hope. Is this the thing that Jonathan Worth is part of too? He said he was doing something this month at MIT.

    The time is right to spread the syndication love and power, with mainstream leaning to subvert their work to silos and profiters in a false shadow of doom and gloom. Google’s shuttering of Reader has people preparing their graveyard shovels for RSS (again). Once again people are missing the point that it’s not about the technical complexities or one specification but the idea and minset (Udellian) of networked thinking and operating. The syndication bus is the open fabric of the web. The xMOOC broadcast model is the one of network TV.

    Making the syndication approach “approachable” at different scales is key- witnes some of the recent frustrations of colleagues Martin Weller and Lisa Lane. The stuff Martin Hawksey is doing is shining the way too.

    Drive that bus right into MIT!

  2. Reverend says:

    Alan,

    I think Jonathan will be there, and I am dying to meet him. I’m with you, I think the critique of xMOOCs right on, and the idea of a co-op posting for open courses and communities is fascinating twitter discussion that came out of forgetting about Martin Hawksey’s magic, and the etmooc hub is as clean as I’ve seen the whole thing work. Couros loved it when I talked to him at SUNY, and I think it really frames an architecture that is truly Udellian. I spent four hours on the trip to Columbus listening to three talks by him: “The Disruptive Nature of Technology” (2007) http://www.educause.edu/blogs/gbayne/podcast-disruptive-nature-technology-jon-udell,his talk from 2010 “Architectures of Context” http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4532.html and his conversation about syndication frameworks with Rohit Khare from UC Irvine. Interesting stuff for this kind of thinking http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/09/11/a-conversation-with-rohit-khare-about-syndication-oriented-architecture/

    All recommendations from Gardner Campbell, who has been blogging up a storm himself as of late, and amazing stuff!

  3. Pingback: The Awareness Network: the Web as Context Engine | bavatuesdays

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