Conceptual Design of EduFeedr—an Educationally Enhanced Mash-up Tool for Agora Courses

Increasing number of educational institutions are making their courses openly available in the Web. However, open course could be a confusing term because openness can have several meanings: open access to static content such as in MIT OpenCourseWare, use of an open learning environment based on Web 2.0 tools or a course in traditional LMS with an open registration. In this paper we are focusing on specific kind of open courses that share all of the following three criteria: (1) openly accessible content, (2) open personal learning environment, and (3) free and open registration for participation. We propose to use a new term — agora course — while referring to courses of this kind. Agora is a Greek word for a place for assembly or an ancient marketplace. p. 1

In spring 2008 the author of this paper was teaching an agora course in University of Art and Design Helsinki. On that course Wikiversity was used as a central component of the learning environment [1]. Other tools that were used in the course contained teachers’ blog in Wordpress.com, students’ blogs on various blogging platforms, social bookmarking service (Delicious) and Web 2.0 environments for sharing content that was created by the participants (LeMill1, photo sharing websites, podcast hosting websites and video sharing websites). The course started with more than 50 participants who signed up on a wiki page. p. 1

This paper addresses the challenges of designing one of the central components of a mash-up personal learning environment for agora courses: an educationally enhanced mash-up tool that supports planning, monitoring and analyzing learning activities which cross the borders of different Web 2.0 applications. p. 2

These special features have been always present in traditional learning management systems, but if we want to keep our agora courses as open as possible, we should allow our students to use their own personal learning environments. p. 2

There have been some studies and developments in the similar direction such as MUPPLE [3], simple aggregating mash-up The Wire [4] and knowledge discovery application PALADIN [5], but none of these are addressing exactly the needs. p. 2

In order to clarify the design requirements a lightweight prototype was built using Bento personal database application for Mac OS X. p. 2

An example scenario is presented in figure 1. p. 3

John has been using EduFeedr for a few weeks. For him the most exiting feature is the way how connections between the blogs are presented. EduFeedr has a visualization where all the blogs are displayed as nodes. Lines between the nodes show the links between the blog posts. All the students have linked to the course blog. Some of the student blogs have a lot of connections while others have not been so active. It is possible to switch on a different view and see who has commented which blog. This time John finds out that some student blogs have actually more comments than his blog. The same information is also displayed as a table where it is easy to see how many pingbacks and comments each participant has made. EduFeedr has also aggregated all the comments. It means that John can see all comments that one student has made on a same page without visiting all the blogs. This will save him a lot of time, because commenting is part of his grading scheme and students get points for that. p. 3

References p. 4

1. Leinonen, T., Vadén, T., Suoranta, J.: Learning in and with an open wiki project: Wikiversity’s potential in global capacity building. First Monday 14(2), (2009). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2252/2093 p. 4

3. Wild, F., Mödritscher, F., Sigurdarson, S.: Designing for Change: Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments. eLearning Papers 9, (2008) p. 4

5. Klamma, R., Spaniol, M., Dimitar, D.: PALADIN: A Pattern Based Approach to Knowledge Discovery in Digital Social Networks. In: Tochtermann, K., Maurer, H. (eds.). Proceedings of I-KNOW '06, 6th International Conference on Knowledge Management, Graz, Austria, September 6 – 8, pp. 457–464. Springer, Heidelberg (2006) p. 4

3 Trackback ‘em All. http://scott.yang.id.au/code/trackback-em-all/ 4 POSH. http://sourceforge.net/projects/posh/ 5 rawdog. http://offog.org/code/rawdog.html 6 Tornado. http://www.tornadoweb.org p. 4