http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/
2007/02/stringle_almost.html and http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/stringle2.php
Martin Weller and Tony Hirst have joined Marc Eisenstadt as bloggers from the UK’s Open University whose posts I now eagerly await, so it’s a distinct pleasure to find Martin posting about Tony’s project, Stringle.
I can almost hear the chorus now about how “a PLE is not an application” and yes, but whatever. Tony has assembled a really useful demonstration of how, using feeds, services like grazer and OPML manager and many of the free web 2.0 applications out there (this demonstration uses Google docs, PBWiki, ELGG and Gliffy to name a few), a fairly comprehensive environment can be aggregated together for learners. I don’t think this precludes all of the great learning resources out on the open web at all, in fact it rather welcomes them, and tools and services like Dappit, OpenKapow and ScreenScrapper are now making it easy for anyone to create RSS feeds for web content where previously there were none. It’s not hard for me to see how with something like OpenID implemented on many of these services all of a sudden you can have your safe password protected areas for student work and eat your open web 2.0 cake too. Take some time and play around with what Tony has assembled and see if it doesn’t jog your imagination. Is it going to replace your CMS tomorrow. Probably not if you are wedded to how that’s working for you. But darn if it doesn’t beckon to a day when making use of a new Web 2,0 app in your course in a way that works for you, for students AND your administration isn’t as easy as … rip, mix, feed. – SWL
.
Hi Scott, regarding rip, mix, feed, I thought you might like to check out the new Web Services API out in Moodle 1.8 Beta (just released):
“Web Services API – Catalyst, Richard Wyles
The Moodle Network code includes an XML-RPC call dispatcher that can expose the WHOLE Moodle API to trusted hosts. We will building on this in further versions but you can start using it now if you need to.”
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Web_Services_API
Scott,
Looks like I’m a little late on this topic, but I thought I would mention that the company I work for, Mozenda, just recently released a tool that not only allows you to create feeds from unstructured data, but also provides an API to access that data. So, its kind of taking a Dapper, OpenKapow, or ScreenScaper and putting it on top of something like Mashery. We hope that by giving people the ability to reuse their data through API, it will make that data even more helpful.
Nate, never too late
Normally I stip out urls that seem like ‘plugs’ for products, but yours is on topic and a welcome part of the conversation. I look forward to investigating it further. Cheers, Scott
Mozenda is a fantastic screen-scraping program. Its ability to carry out different actions on various websites so it could later do everything I need automatically is invaluable.