I’ve currently got a WP blog - and have been importing the posts into an Elgg powered one  http://eduspaces.net/emmadw/weblog)
I’d been looking on/off for the option to post to the WordPress blog in the same way (really to prove that I could do it, rather than anything else!); however, never found it. (Probably was using the wrong search terms, as I searched for a RSS importer, rather than aggregator…)

Now that the future of the Eduspaces is a little up in the air, I’m looking round. That said, I have no intention of moving the WordPress blog, nor, given that it’s my only blog, would I have another one that I’d need to import. But it’s nice to know I *can* should I wish to!

RE Mediawiki to Wordpress/Drupal/Feedreader — Tony pointed this out somewhere on the intarweb, and I’ve been dying to try it ever since:

http://jimbojw.com/wiki/index.php?title=WikiArticleFeeds_Extension

And, @Tony, re Jim’s comment: “Thanks for all the unbelievable goodness in this comments, and Brian’s and on OUseful, amazing stuff you are working on for sure.” — Tony, I definitely need to echo that. I have a lot of catching up on Real Live Work to do tomorrow as a result of spending way too much time today reading back posts at OUseful.

Cheers,

Bill

I wish I had the time to dedicate to these comments, damn new jobs and family

I actually don;t really see the mixing and matching of different courses using this model as a porblem. All you would need to do in WPMu is pull the course in, delete the elements that came in as post that you don’t want, then just reorder the posts by changing the time stamp. Tom said as much ina post on Chris Lott’s blog, and it would work perfectly. Still extremely simple, and it is a way to remix several courses into one resources. In fact, WP-o-Matic (to answer another question Tony) would let me pull in all the courses into on blog and work from there, or choose an handful of courses for one blog. Automating the process of a blog for each course as it is set up now would be a little more difficult, but with WPMu, it definitely can be done.

@Tony:
The MediaWiki as a content store pushed out to WordPress is something I have been thinking about for a while. We were throwing around the term Bliki, and the integration plugin for sign-on no longer works with 2.3.3 (or WPMu 1.3.3) but I think the code can be updated. The real issue, as you point out, is pull the MediaWIki code into a WP post or page seamlessly on demand. I originally got the idea from a Typo3 extension that did this beautifully, they basically sued fcurl to pull in the html layer, and it looked good, we played with some possibilities of going the other way, i.e., WP to MediaWIki, but have yet to hit paydirt. I am glad you are interested in this possibility, because I have been excited about it for a little while, but just haven’t found the plugin or the time to hunt down some one who could actually code it.

I imagine it wouldn’t be that hard, but that is where I quickly get out of my depth. I would love to talk more about this and other issues you mention in more detail. feel free to e-mail me jimgroom_at_gmail.com

And as a fair warning, I may do the same to you sometime soon Thanks for all the unbelievable goodness in this comments, and Brian’s and on OUseful, amazing stuff you are working on for sure. Brian has praised you up and down, and I’m glad to finally have the opportunity to join the chorus of accolades.

“From what I can tell, a lot of the oer material released to date as opencourseware is virtually unusable by anyone except sophisticated/experienced learners or maybe educators looking to reuse it (though how i’m not sure)…”

This is exactly what I mean when, in this thread, I say:

“Right now, it take some technical chops to quickly and easily remix individual elements from different courses into one different course. I see this as a barrier to more widespread adoption of OER’s.”

The difficulty of recontextualizing content that is supposed to be Open Courseware is a barrier to more widespread adoption — the Grazr techniques you describe work, but they are too technical/involved for many users.

If the existing Open Courseware repositories allowed their content to be accessed via rss feeds as part of their normal procedures, more people would benefit.

Keep up the spamming!

I just put some thoughts up inspired by this post, and some of the others flying around the web: http://openacademic.org/news/oers-publishing-easy-part

Cheers,

Bill