World Forum 1 image courtesy of Dunechaser.

This part of the Reading Capital discussion framework looks at the Reading Capital Forums (powered by bbPress) and a feature called Discourse which is the theme Prologue for WordPress blogs that offers a similar functionality as Twitter without the 140 character limitation. Despite what the title of this post might suggest, this isn’t an either/or choice, but I would like to think about how the two might offer different approaches to online conversation and discussion

Forums

The forums for the Reading Capital site are using the bbPress software which has a number of nice features. First off, it integrates cleanly with WordPress Multi-User (the application that is powering the main site) which means if you sign-up for a blog or just a user name on the Reading Capital site, you are automatically part of the forums. You just login on the main site and head over to the forums, you can customize your space on the forums, get an avatar using Gravatar, and take advantage of the rich RSS possibilities with bbPress. This forum software allows you to subscribe to a feed for all of the forums or select forums of interest to you or just specific feeds on topics within a forum. Moreover, it allows users to tag specific topics that display on the main page, and users can add forum topics to a personal favorite list.

BbPress also has some cool plugins that add some nice functionality like embedding images and embedding video by simply copying the URL into a forum post (and it works with a host of different video services). Such a feature could make for some interesting postings of homemade YouTube videos of a reading or discussion within the forums. There is also the possibility of Private Forums, spam control with an Akismet plugin, and a feature that allows users to designate potential flamers as Bozos—which bans the user surreptitiously by keeping their posts effectively hidden from the rest of the forum, although it doesn’t appear that way to them I like that feature!

Truth be told, I don’t have that much experience or success with forums, though I do think they could be useful for such an endeavor. I’m interested to see if they get picked up and used. Either way, the setup of bbPress is painless, and exploring its features has been fun.

Discourse

The Discourse feature of the Reading Capital site is simply a WordPress blog that is using the Prologue theme, which makes it akin to an interface like Twitter. Anyone who gets a blog on the Reading Capital site can easily create a similar space for conversation and discussion by selecting this theme (you can also do it just as easily with WordPress.com). The format of Discourse seems well suited for a distributed conversational space wherein people can quickly post replies and thoughts right from the front page of the blog without going back and forth into the admin section. It also has one feed for all the posts and another for comments.

As you can see above, it is a clean, straightforward interface that allows you to post quickly from the front page of the blog. You can also tag your posts. What’s more, the avatars give the space a very personable feel, and each user’s name is linked so you can see all their posts. On top of that, you can comment on someone’s post which can be threaded much like a forum with a reply to a reply.

The other thing I like about this approach is that it allows people who already have a user name or blog within the Reading capital environment to sign themselves up for this space by adding their email to the sidebar, using Andre Malan’s Add User widget. In this way, it would be quite simple for someone who is running a reading group to quickly create an on-the-fly conversational space with no overhead. I have been thinking about this format for courses, and blogged about it here. And while I am not sure such a space is conducive for discussion of a tome like Capital, I remain of the mindset to just throw it all out there and see what sticks, if anything.

So, now we have two more options for continuing the discussion through this distributed framework. Keep in mind, however, none of these tools need be thought of as exclusive to another or mandatory, rather they all represent just different approaches to communally thinking through and sharing ideas about a given text.

Marx and Engels lego photo used courtesy of Dunechaser

So I’m finally returning to creating a discussion framework for the Reading Capital site. I will detail my thinking for the design of the site below (and in at least two subsequent posts), and I invite any and all recommendations and criticisms. It’s a model that is far from perfect, but provides an opportunity to look at how we might provide a platform for aggregating and re-presenting posts and discussions in a distributed manner.

For the technical details behind this setup go here for more information.

Section 1: Blogging

I am going to begin with blogs because I think they provide a powerful tool for conducting a discussion that allows for filtered feeds, more precise aggregation, little or no publishing overhead, and individual “ownership” of the original posts for archival posterity. More than that, it allows one to compose and publish their work from their own space, while at the same time pushing it out to a site like Reading Capital where others might see it, follow the link back to the original site, and engage in conversation on the author’s blog and beyond. Blogging is, at its core, a way of making connections around ideas, and what’s more it provides each person with their own space to feature, control, and share their work on a range of subjects.

So, how does blogging work in Reading Capital? Well, quite simply actually. If you have your own blog then you’ll just share your feed for aggregation (more on this in the next sections). If you don’t have a blog you have a host of free options. You can get a blog with WordPress.com, Blogger, TypePad, or even from the Reading Capital site itself (which is being run on WordPress Multi-User).

Note: a quick word on blogging platforms that I would love some input on, it is my experience that WordPress.com (based on WPMu) are the only large, commercial services that allow for feeds on categories and tags out of the box. Am I wrong with this? If not, then I highly recommend you get a blog on WordPress.com so that you get filter your site’s content using category and/or tag feeds (more on why and how to do this shortly).

Section 2: Adding and Filtering Feeds

So, once you have your own blog and you start writing and linking to things, discovering YouTube embed, the beauty of Flickr photos, and all kinds of other fun stuff that has nothing to do with your reading of Marx’s Capital, you are going to need a mechanism for filtering only certain content from your blog to the Reading Capital site. Here is how you do this with your own WordPress blog, a WordPress.com blog, or a blog you get on Reading Capital.

*Filtering content by category

Filtering content by category is fairly straightforward. All you need to do is place the posts you want to filter out accordingly to a specific category, and then grab the feed for that category. For example, if I wanted to feed my posts about my reading capital from bavatuesdays out to the Reading Capital site, which I will, then I would just need to create a category called Reading Capital and put all my posts about this subject in that category. Then grab the feed which will look like this:

 http://bavatuesdays.com/category/reading…

*Filtering content by tag

If you don’t want to create a separate category, that’s fine, just tag all your posts that have your readings with a consistent and unique term. For example, I will be tagging my posts that have my reading with “reading-capital” (no quotes in the tag), the feed for which will look like this:

 http://bavatuesdays.com/tag/reading-capi…

Section 3: Aggregation of Content to the Reading Capital Site

The aggregation of people’s content from where ever they are blogging into the Reading Capital site is the ultimate goal. This is accomplished pretty easily (if you want the technical details go to this post) with the “Add RSS” field in the sidebar of the Reading Capital site. All you need to do is add the filtered feed for you blog that we detailed above, and the relevant posts from your blog with be republished on the site.

There are a couple of useful things about this setup. First, the post title (also known as the permalink) actually links back to original post on the author’s site. Second, comments are closed on the re-published post so that people will go to the respective post and comment there, keeping in logic with the distributed logic of blogs. Third, the entire posts are republished on reading capital so that it provides an aggregator for all relevant posts that anyone can subscribe to  http://readingcapital.org/feed), browse, or search.

We already have a useful example that may clarify a few things. Jack Stephens of The Mustard Seed fame has included the feed for his WordPress.com blog. By including the feed for his whole site  http://themustardseed.wordpress.com/feed) all of his content will show up on Reading Capital. Now if he were to create a category and/or tag titled readingcapital, or whatever he likes, and then tag or categorize the relevant poss according after adding the new feed to the sidebar —which would look something like this http://themustardseed.wordpress.com/cate… only the relevant posts would be re-published, allowing for filtered content for very specific tags or categories. Pretty cool, no?

The D.I.Y. Lego Karl Marx (Image courtesy of Dunechaser)

So while I am waiting for my very own copy of Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 to arrive in the mail, I figured I ‘d get to work (in the spirit of Frank Sobotka) on some ideas I have been playing around with for a while now. In short, how might you quickly create a syndicated framework for a a wide variety of loosely joined discussions around a course like the one David Harvey is offering up here? My first question when I initially saw this amazing resource was how would you capture the various traces of discussion surrounding these readings that might galvanize a intellectual community of ideas, activism, and critiques?

I originally thought opening up comments on the actual blog where the videos are being published might be one way, but it occurred to me that it kind of centralizes the discussion around one resource, begging for a kind of interaction with professor Harvey that is not only unlikely, but impractical. Think of all the open resources out their right now, they come pre-packaged in iTunesU or some other anemic, branded delivery system that gives you the resource, but fails to actually frame any kind of community around the space. Learning does not happen within a tube of consumption, but rather through a series of relations within a community of engaged and excited thinkers.

This being the case, I figured I would take yet another stab at framing a space where discussion around a resource like this one can be easily traced, engaged, captured, and archived in a manner as distributed or centralized as one likes. So I started creating Reading Capital this weekend (an independent discussion space for David Harvey’s course) that is first and foremost a proto-type of the syndicated architecture that a bunch of folks have been thinking about for a number of years now. I really don’t expect anyone to use this site extensively (though anyone is free to, and that would obviously be fun), rather I see it more as a space to kind of fine tune the thinking and technical process I have been going through so I can finally accomplish a few of things I have been meaning to do:

1. There has been a lot of talk about Do-It-Yourself educational technology, and I figured an occasion like this would give some of us the opportunity to really think about the possibilities and limitations of such a model. There is always a lot of theoretical talk about what we do or do not need, but I find a project like this helps me focus on praxis, a marriage of the technical details of what is currently possible, with the larger vision of what makes more sense and allows us to truly frame a distributed community for thinking, learning, and sharing together beyond the boundaries of any given classroom, institution, or geographically determined reality.
2. Focus on explaining and documenting my thought process when creating a discussion hub like this using freely available, open source tools. In many ways it is working on the same model as UMW Blogs, but I have included some additional features like allowing anyone to add their blog’s RSS feed (or whatever other kind of site you are using that has syndication), anyone can signup for a blog, discussion forums, a wiki, and a twitter-like discussion space that I’m calling Discourse–that is simp;ly a theme that anyone could reproduce on this site or WordPress.com.
3. Keeping my own skills in developing these spaces honed. Ever since UMW Blogs went live last Summer, the whole thing ran so smoothly I found I was spending a good amount of time shepherding communities on that site more than playing with the actual technologies. Which, by the way, is a more rewarding and effective use of my time. Nonetheless, I like thinking of the Summer as an opportunity to get a bit deeper into the general hacking of these open source applications to see what they can and cannot do.

All that said, the site is still under construction. I will be finishing up the details over the next week, and will be providing in-depth documentation for using each element of the space. Also,there will be four more blog posts in rapid succession detailing the different, RSS-rich features of this syndicated framework, and why I choose to include them, and what they might provide in the way of discussion. I have to freely admit the site is overkill, but in many ways I needed that along with some honest critiques and discussion about this model so that we can keeping examining the possibilities without getting to mired down in the details.