creative commons licensed via flickr by cobalt123

One of the more recent trends in online teaching is the use of social networking sites–outside the context of a course management-based source like Blackboard or Moodle–for course discussion activities. For example, some instructors are assigning students to create individual blogs, which they update regularly, and which the classmates are expected to read and comment on each others’. Alternately, some instructors have started using Twitter or Facebook because it limits the length of student comments.

Using these networks in addition to a course management system can lead to some great discussion experiences for you and your students, though it could also seriously raise stress levels if you all have to check multiple sources whenever you want to find updates.

The best way to get around that for blogs is through an RSS feed, if you’re not already using one. I’ve been using Google Reader to collect RSS feeds of various websites for a while now. Unfortunately, not all discussion and comment sites accommodate RSS update notifications. Some services like FriendFeed and Nomee will consolidate updates from a few specific sources but not all, and even then, it’s another window to keep open for update checking.

To see if I can get around this dilemma, I’m going to experiment with Yahoo Pipes. Supposedly this system will collect updates from various sources and feed it into an RSS. This video from their website gives a brief tutorail about how to set up a pipe system:

This all looks very slick, but my experiment is going to see how well this works in reality and report back here on its effectiveness. Specifically, I want to target those sources that don’t already forward new content into my RSS or preferred email account:

• The WISE Introduction to Online Pedagogy course via Confluence – Confluence theoretically has an RSS feature to let me know if anyone has commented on a specific page, but it doesn’t work.
• The WISE discussion forums via phpBB – Another resource that came highly recommended to me, but doesn’t send notifications of new messages.
• My Hotmail account – I’m trying to switch to Gmail as my secondary email account, which is more user-friendly and offers more services than Hotmail. However, while Gmail will forward messages to any other email address, Hotmail will not forward to any address that’s not under the MSN umbrella. If I can somehow rig Yahoo Pipes to notify me of new messages to the Hotmail account, it would make the transition easier so I don’t have to constantly check both accounts.

Anyway, this is my project for the day. We’ll see how well it works…and whether it’s worth recommending as a time-saver for instructors with multiple sites and accounts to check on a daily basis.

Yahoo Pipes

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 9:47 am and is filed under Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.