Additional lesson learned on the Fishtank (earlier lessons and description here ): RSS2.0 wrinkles. Sometimes I get links within blog reported within the rss:content or description elements, sometimes not (depending on the blog). That's a little sad, 'cuz it disrupts the construction of sioc:links_to information, and I'd like to explore what could be done with that info. For example, I think it's interesting to compare the tags/categories used on a post with the tags/categories used on a post the first post links to.

Interesting thing emerging from the talks at Faculty Academy: the emergence of connections. Connections is nothing new, but I'm struck by a reversal of direction. Instead of lots of discussion along the lines of "I used technology to produce X kind of connection in students," the discussion has been much more toward "I tried X with a vague idea in mind, and we all discovered these kinds of connections." That is, I see a very happy and healthy starting point in gray area, and delight in what comes out. That's at least implicit in the discussion of sharing-oriented sites (here, here, and here), more explicitly in the Interactivism panel, and extraordinarily powerfully in Barbara Ganley's plenary session

There are still wrinkles that need ironing (which comes as no surprise to those familiar with my sartorial style), but the Fishtank for Faculty Academy is up and running. Here's a description and screenshot, along with how it works and some lessons learned.

Fishtanks are colorful, interesting, and constantly transforming -- just like the intellectual life around the Faculty Academy. We're using that metaphor to describe what we're capturing here, a view on the blog posts about Faculty Academy events. (Information about registering your blog to be included in the list is in your program). The blog page gets you into scuba gear to dive right into the depths of the blogs. Here, you're looking into the fishtank to see an overview of the posts, including the author, tags and/or categories used for the post, a preview, and what sites the post links to. You can focus in on any of those aspects by clicking on the information in the four boxes below (kinda like focusing on the little treasure chest, or on the log, or on the kelp, etc.). Enjoy the variety of ways to look at our time together (just don't ask who's the plecostomus).

How it works

First, we asked attendees who plan to be blogging the conference to register their blogs, so we have a list of the blogs, who owns them, and their RSS feeds. (The RSS feeds are also used by Jim Groom to use WordPress-O-Matic to collect all the posts to the Faculty Academy blog page). A (somewhat hastily cobbled) PHP script uses RAP and Triplr to look for posts with "FA07" as the tag or category put that info into a big, beautiful RDF Graph. Along the way, I add in some extra SIOC data. This much is reworking earlier work I blogged about here. Then, parts of that graph are exported into a JSON file to be used by SIMILE's Exhibit. And "ta-daa!" you've got the exhibit of people blogging the Faculty Academy.

Yes, I know this isn't saying much. It's really just here to let me test some features I'm working on for the Faculty Academy site here.

What features? Keep your fingers crossed that they all work, but if they do the Faculty Academy will get a good dose of the structured web, with some special ingredients from SIMILE's Exhibit.

Watch here for links to all the working parts--or to discussion of what might have been and what glitches jumped up and bit me.

No time to blog! Too much to do!