Here at University of Mary Washington we've been maintaining an installation of WordPress MultiUser, called UMWBlogs for several months. We now have about 800 registered blogs from students and faculty for their teaching and learning.
To an extent, this looks like a great community of learners. But, they're all still individual blogs, and as such suffer from all the island-like qualities of any other set of blogs. There's no way, for example, to find all the blogs belonging to faculty in a particular department, nor is there a way (beyond hoping that blogrolls are present and accurate) to find blogs that are related, say, by class or topic.
And so my mission is to produce a "directory" of the blogs in UMWBlogs.
But wait! There's more! Some of our student and faculty bloggers needed plugins, themes, or customizations not available in our WPMU installation, and so they have independent WP installations on other servers. Some faculty also have blogs outside umwblogs. There are a few Drupal installations floating around being used for teaching and learning. It would also be nice for the directory to include things like some of our Omeka installation being used in a digital history class. Surely the online teaching and learning landscape will continue to change, and we'll want to be able to handle that as time goes by.
So, the first big question is: Just what is a "directory" of all this anyway?
Traditional print analogies to an index of users and blog names is one quick way to go. But it seems like there are much more interesting uses to think about. And so, as an exercise in imagining possibilities, I've started a list of possible other kinds of uses without regard for how feasible any of them are. They're all in the form, "I want to find. . . ". I'm just wanting to think about what would be interesting to everyone.
I've asked some of our more active faculty bloggers to comment here to get the conversation going, but I hope others will bring in some other ideas, too.
I want to find:
- tags used by people blogging for classes in a department
- list of the blogs, with the name of the writer
- list of the course blogs
- blogs being used for more than one course
- blogs for courses in a department
- blogs for courses that meet a particular graduation requirement
- blogs with most links to other blogs
- network of blog links, displayed as a network
- blogs linking to X blog
- blogs X blog links to
- blogs relevant to a given person
- blogs for a particular course
- tags used by a person
- tags used in blogs for a class
- tags used in more than one class
- tags used in more than one department
Seems like you could accomplish a few of the things on your wishlist by including Microformatted information on each blog and aggregating/parsing that information into a directory. Use hCards for the blog author, department, and instructor. Use hCalendar and vevent for specific courses. Use links with rel="me" to indicate that a blog owner has other blogs on the network or off. Google's Social Graph API might help you with this.
Just some quick thoughts....would be quite a bit of work, though, but I think it would be really cool.
Jeremy,
I completely agree--I'd love to be able to make use of microformats, especially since I'm using ARC2 to parse things to RDF, and ARC2 supports a bunch of microformats. The big stumbling blog -- I mean block -- is the wider array of blogs and data in general. For umwblogs, it might be possible to reliably get microformats in. But when I start encompassing other platforms, that'll get stickier very quickly. So at least so far I'm limiting myself to what I can count on from as wide an array of platforms as I can, which means RSS/Atom feeds, and just coping with the limitations as best I can. At least that's my approach for now...curious about your thoughts on it.
And I'm also thinking/hoping that the Social Graph API will help me out--haven't really had a chance to tinker on that front yet!
Patrick
Would the Drupal/Eduglu site be a start for this? It has some legs in this regard I think:
http://eduglu.learningparty.net
Also, more simply, and will far less of the features you highlight here, a simple member directory tutorial is available here, I just saw it and was thinking about playing with it:
http://wpmututorials.com/how-to/making-a-member-list-blog-directory/
I thought a lot about that. It partially depends on what, exactly, we decide this thing should be and do. It also hinges a bit on some of the other projects and needs that are floating around DTLT and UMW. The big thing for me is the richness of SIOC data as compared to RSS or Atom. If I can get it all parsed nicely, we'll have something that is much more extensible and flexible (even than Drupal! -- well, at least until all the semantic web goodness gets built into Drupal)
An ambitious project to be sure. Is there any easy way (say a plug-in for WP) to at least track and aggregate the tags and links between blogs on the WP MU site?
There might be something, I'm not sure. The first thing I thought of was the SIOC exporter, though I don't know if it is happy in multiuser. But the broader problem is thinking about beyond umwblogs -- I don't want to leave out non-umwblogs blogs, nor do I want the students and faculty to have to care about what RDF and SIOC are (well, at least not to the point of having to install or manage plugins!)
So what I'm looking at/for is something smart enough to generate SIOC data just from an Atom or RSS2 feed. I built a mostly working prototype a while ago. It was using the RDF API for PHP, though, and I think I need to move to ARC2 for this.
Upshot: I'll likely be building something that'll put it all into an RDF graph using the SIOC and Tagging ontologies, and querying against that.
Post new comment