Aggregation and the Blogs at Penn State

Posted on March 17, 2008 
Filed Under Blogs at PSU, Social Ratings

Blogs Tag SmallIt isn’t a big surprise that more and more faculty, staff, and students are taking advantage of the Blogs at Penn State for all sorts of things. We are seeing incredible examples of student blogs, faculty portfolios, staff spaces, and course sites popping up all over the PSU Personal Webspace. It also doesn’t come as a surprise that as more people start to create more digital content that discoverability becomes more of an issue. With this in mind, one of the things we are thinking a whole lot about is creating an easy solution for aggregating content into discoverable spaces.

In our world we think quite a bit about how to do this for teaching and learning purposes. One of the things we are looking at are social rating tools that also act as aggregators. I took the plunge this semester along with my co-instructor, Scott McDonald, and installed the open source tool Pligg for our C&I 597C course. The way it works is that students blog in their own PSU Blogs and their content is aggregated into our course Pligg site where it can be read, voted on, and commented on. Voting makes the top posts rise to the top. Commenting creates a vibrant community where students can share ideas in the open. So far it has proven to be a very interesting model.

This year we will be exploring more aggregation tools to help faculty and students create mash ups of the content that matters to them. We aren’t going to build the next iGoogle or Ning, but we will be spending a lot of energy in this space over the next year. If you have interest in this area, please contact us or leave a comment.

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One Response to “Aggregation and the Blogs at Penn State”

  1. Natalie Harp on March 18th, 2008 8:51 am

    Love what you’re doing in these spaces - what makes it especially lovely is its simplicity. Looking forward to seeing what you do in the coming months with educational mashups.

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