StigmergicWeb

We’ve all become fairly accustomed to this read-write web thingy where we are all consumers and producers of information. I use the pronoun we assuming that if you are reading this, you are probably also involved in creating some sort of online content (blogging, wiki-ing, podcasting, contributing to discussion groups) or you soon will be. But I’ve noticed lately that another element is being emphasized, that of blending different RSS or Atom feeds together to create a sort of meta-feed. I don’t think that its new because I’m sure that I remember reading Brian and Alan writing about Rip-Mix-Feed, a pithy little meme summarizing how information can be repurposed using some fairly simple small technologies. In a sense, we all do this every day. I talk to students and colleagues, I pick up ideas from them (as they might also do from me), our ideas all get remixed somewhere in the connections my frontal cortex, and I pass the remixed ideas on to others as I speak with them or, most notably, as I write. I have found that blog writing is a medium especially well suited to this forwarding of my mental feeds.

I’ve noticed this sort of RSS-blending technology seems to be catching on lately amongst us edu-geeks. Stephen, of course, has been doing this for a long time with EduRSS, and as usual its just taken a few years for the rest of us to catch up. SuprGlu is a web service that also does this mix blending, with very polished looking results. As cool as SuprGlu is, I was slightly dissatisfied because I wanted to put something like this together on a page on my domain. Shortly thereafter, Stephen released MyGlu, which is a subset of EduRSS that replicates the functionality of SuprGlu, but with all the yummy freshness of open source code included. Additionally:

MyGlu not only aggregates feeds, it also filters them according to your specifications. So, for example, you could aggregate your posts, photos and bookmarks with the term ‘Amsterdam’ in them.

Impressive! Shortly thereafter, D’Arcy began musing:

I’ve been giving some thought to the “school aggregator” that grew out of the discussions around Northern Voice. What kinds of things will it have to be able to do? Types of interfaces? Explicit and implicit data and metadata? How to manage caching of items, and manage displaying the potentially hundreds of thousands of bits of content that will be pulled into the system over the course of a year? And how to present cohorts/classes/years within this? How to allow students to add multiple data sources, and tag it for use in whatever class context(s)? How to let students and teachers mine the aggregated data to get what they need/want? Lots of stuff to chew on here.

His post on EduGlu is worth reading not only for D’Arcy’s musings, but for the brilliant conversation that is evolving in the comments. Its like my bloglines account talking amongst itself!

So where does that lead us? It turns out that the crew on the good ship elgg have built this capability right into elgg, as D’Arcy just blogged (Elgguglu?!? Yikes, I hope that name doesn’t catch on!). Scott Leslie was simultaneously, synchronistically also pondering if elgg is the mythical EduGlu, his post prompted by reading Dave Tosh’s notes on feedbooks and populating an elgg blog with external content. (By the way, if this works, this blog post will show up not only on my personal blog, but also on my elgg blog).

The emerging theme in all of this is that we seem to learn (and in this context I’m not sure if we means edtech geeks or people in general) through the strange combinations and permutations of ideas that we have picked up from others, which we then pass along to the people around us. I think this is what George Siemens means when he describes connectivism:

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

I know that this is how I, as an edtech geek-blogger-podcaster, learn. When I get the chance to watch students engaged in powerful learning, I believe this is how they are learning as well. When I am blogging, I am also hooked into the same process - I read many potent ideas that others are posting on weblogs, I blend the ideas in with some of the secret herbs and spices dwelling in my pre-frontal cortex, and I write down this strange concoction of ideas in public so that you can read this and the whole process reiterates over and over and over …

Now we are pulling together tools to make it easy for us to do the same thing automagically. The thought of that is so profoundly revolutionary, I can’t begin to fathom what this might lead to. Truly, the read-write web is rapidly becoming old-fashioned, and the read-blend-write web is waiting in the wings ready to take its place.

There are many over-whelming ideas left to explore here, but its getting late. If I don’t stop now, I might end up turning this into a Jerry Maguire-esque breakdown/epiphany.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 00:36 and is filed under Geeking out, small pieces, RSS, technology in education, stigmergy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.