EdStartUp Intro: Innovating Around Syndication

Jim Groom’s EdStartup Intro Video from Jim Groom on Vimeo.

I finally did my introductory video for EdStartup 101, an online MOOC that is brilliant model of a distributed, syndication-based architecture that drives participation in the course. What’s more, the great Martha Burtis worked with David Wiley to figure out how to seamlessly get the sign-up process (which integrates with BuddyPress) to immediately populate and integrate feeds from the get go. So, without any extra labor on the part of the instructor, each person’s feed immediately pulls in, associates with the proper user, and starts syndicating their work. It’s such a beautiful thing, and you can see it working seamlessly on EdStartup here. In my mind this is a proto-type for an open, easily managed framework based on WordPress that any course could use. As of now it’s dependent on the premium plugin Gravity Forms, but hopefully there will be a completely free and open option soon. So, what I’ll try and be doing over the course of this semester is frame-out such an approach on an institutional scale that a university could embrace and pilot as a way to give its community members the ability to manage and control its own data, while at the same time building the technical infrastructure to make syndication and aggregation easier, more attractive, and architecturally sound.

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2 Responses to EdStartUp Intro: Innovating Around Syndication

  1. Jim,
    Great to have you in the course with us all. I have been appreciating ds101 from the edges. I wanted to +1 your comment about the #edstartup course in your #intro post: “brilliant model of a distributed, syndication-based architecture” – I think this is the thing about #change11 and #edstartup that really has my attention….the new evolving architecture of collaborative learning. I look forward to being in the conversation as you evolve your pilot. And your focus on owning data and taking it with you seamlessly is really a key challenge to solve. Good to meet you here. All the best, Claudia @ClaudiaInWorld

  2. Reverend says:

    Claudia,
    I agree with you about the architecture, and the work Martha Burtis has done with WordPress to make it simple and streamlined is quite impressive. EdStartup is seamlessly pulling in 200+ blogs and ds106 580, what’s more there is no admin overhead for people to signup. We have to watch for spam, and may need to police that a bit more closely, but other than that it makes the architecture piece truly distributed, with the hub acting as both a gateway and an archive. I am really excited about it.

    I look forward to thinking through how to make this more seamless and conceptually simple for other so that the habit of doing all your work on someone else’s servers isn;t the naturalized default. We should all do our work on our spaces and decide where to send it, and that part should be dead simple.

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