LEM: Community Portfolio

Below is my response for the Learning Design Challenge #10: Sharing Individual Content via Community Portfolios. #DailyLEM10

This is something I really want to do for my own classes next year, both with memes created by the students (and their thoughts about those memes), and also the stories they write. For this example, I pursued the meme idea since that fits in nicely with the workshop on open content that we did earlier this summer, but without specifying the nitty-gritty of the community space: Incorporating Open Content.

Right now, students have their own blogs and/or websites as individual portfolios, and I curate content myself (I pin new stories to Pinterest Boards like this one: Indian Epics Fall 2016 which students see at the Project Directory class page), and I keep a lasting archive (eStorybook Central), but I would like to create something more student-driven, where they are putting content into the community space based on what they consider their best work. Right now I don't even have mechanisms in place to harvest the memes they share/create; I only curate stories.

As I've been wrestling with this question for a long time, I see it more as a technology problem than a design problem: I know what I would like to have happen but I had a hard time finding the technology to support it... until now! While on my evening walk yesterday, I had a real brainstorm, and I'm excited to share that here!

What is your desired experience for the activity?
* I want students to be able to share the best things they create (memes, stories) with other students in the class, and I want students to be able to easily discover that content. My goal is to diminish my curatorial and administrative role in order to hand more of that over to the students; after all, only the students know what they consider to be their best work!

How will you motivate participants to engage in “authentic” sharing?
* Students already create content in their own spaces, and they visit each other's spaces as a mode of sharing and learning, and motivation there is very high — so I don't need to do any motivating; students will be even more motivated if I can help them drive the curation process more actively.

What kind(s) of feedback make the most sense for this kind of environment?
* I already have some good student commenting processes in place; my goal here is to add new avenues both of sharing and of discovery which will improve the commenting: the more students are identifying their own best work and, consequently, finding content that is really high quality, the better the commenting process will be.

What are some possible constraints for this design?
* The real constraints are technological: specifically, the mechanisms for sharing (students identifying best content that they put into the shared space) and the mechanisms for discovery (students exploring the shared space to discover what they like best).

Plus: A technological nice-to-have...
* I would like to have one version of the solution be Canvas-friendly; I personally don't use an LMS for my class space, but if I could find a way to make this work in the Canvas space, it is more likely to be an option other faculty at my school would consider.

EURKEA: Inoreader! The key to my solution is this: I will use Inoreader (which currently aggregates all incoming content from my students' blogs), and specifically I will use Inoreader Rules. So, if students include a keyword in their blog post somewhere, I can use an Inoreader Rule to automatically assign a tag. I will just need to write up instructions for how students can add a simple but distinctive keyword (like MemeGallery, one word) when they want to flag something as best content. I can also manually add the tag, if needed, and if a student changes their mind, I can also remove the tag manually. (I already have some processes like this in place for student-generated content; for example, here is the stream of stories for the class — but without a student self-nomination process: Myth-Folklore Stories.)

Once the self-nominated content is tagged for the Gallery, I can then easily redisplay that content in all kinds of ways!

I can put it in Canvas, like this: Meme Gallery. To do that, I use Inoreader's export to HTML feature:

Even better: IFTTT will deliver that content to all kinds of platforms! In IFTTT, the trigger is "Inoreader: New tagged article" (including articles tagged by a rule). Then, the IFTTT action can really be anything. Just to show one example here, I set up a Tumblr that will be filled with content automatically. Here's the IFTTT recipe:

And here's the resulting Tumblr: Meme Gallery Tumblr. Of course, I can play with the gazillions of Tumblr themes to find the best display. I also have access to all the features of Tumblr too. Lots to explore there! I just set this up super-quickly as a test case.

Why Tumblr? An excellent Tumblr feature for my purposes is the randomizer. Randomizers are essential for browsing and discovery for this type of content, and Tumblr is great at delivering posts at random (just add /random to the Tumblr URL). Here's the link: Meme Gallery - Random! I also included that randomizing link in the Canvas page.

VERY happy with this. The real magic is in the technology here, not so much the design. I am so excited to try this out with real student blogs in the Fall!!!

Click here for full-sized view:

Update: I had faked the Inoreader tag to test this out, but I also put a rule in place that will scan all my blog posts just like I want to scan all incoming student blog posts... and it worked! I just published my Growth Mindset Cat meme and because the keyword appeared in the post, presto, there it is in Canvas!

Update: I also created an IFTTT recipe with Pinterest... and that worked too! There's the cat, automatically sent to Pinterest:

Some Tips for Making Good Use of Inoreader

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Thanks to Bonni for mentioning this post in a new post of her own -- CARE, VOICES, SCREEN TIME, AND ZOOM SETTINGS -- and I wanted to refer everyone to a super-detailed catalog of step by step how-tos with Inoreader that I wrote this summer, esp. for people using student blog networks:

Summer2020.LauraGibbs.net

Thank you, Bonni! :-)

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I use Inoreader to manage my class blog network, and I also use it for my own personal learning network, so that means I spend a lot of time at Inoreader! In a separate post I wrote something about using Inoreader's syndication features to create class blog hub pages, and I've also written up a post about using Inoreader to create a blog network for #Rhizo15. In this post I just want to make some general observations about how I use Inoreader, both for my classes and also for keeping up with education blogs and news.

But first . . .

Some Background. I'm one of those people who was really sad about the demise of Google Reader (I used the old Reader bundles and blogroll features extensively), and I never really liked Feedly very much because it had no syndication features, just item-by-item sharing. With Inoreader, though, I have pretty much everything I could wish for when it comes to a feed reader; it's like Google Reader and Gmail and Yahoo Pipes combined. The basic (free) version of Inoreader offers RSS outgoing syndication for folders and tags, so if you have any interest at all in opening up your aggregator space to share with others, Inoreader can do that for you. (Feedly keep promising collection sharing, but even though I have a lifetime pro account and applied for "early access," I still don't have that collection-sharing feature, which I might in fact use for some additional syndication given that Feedly has such a huge user base.)

I should also note there are LOTS of features of Inoreader that I don't use (so I have not mentioned them below), and some features I have not even explored (yet). Most of the features I use are part of the free service, although I use a few premium features also; here are more details about Inoreader free and paid plans. They are good at posting news inside the Inoreader dashboard and at the Inoreader blog, and they are also active at Twitter and Google+. In my experience, they are very responsive to bug reports and feature requests, so don't be shy to contact them with questions and suggestions!

(from the Inoreader blog)

And now, here are . . .

MY INOREADER TIPS AND TRICKS

1. FOLDERS AND TAGS. In a lot of ways folders and tags are alike, but folders really are important because you can do things with folders you cannot do with tags. You can use folders to manage rules, bundles, OPML sharing, and dashboard views; you cannot use tags to do those things (although it would be nice if you could!). So, I make sure to put every feed in at least one folder, and I often have feeds in multiple folders, which can be very handy (so I have Education blogs, and also Must-Read Education blogs as separate folders).

2. USING TAGS. Tags show up with folders in the navigation pane, and they are incredibly helpful for me in managing my reading habits. I also use tags for workflow, adding and removing tags as I process something. With student blog posts, for example, I use tags to tag a problem the student needs to fix (like when they try to display Pixabay images by remote linking, etc. etc.), and then I remove the tag when the student has fixed the problem. I also use tags for sharing specific types of assignments with students, like the stream of Storytelling posts as a page at the course hub.

3. TAGS AND RULES. Rules (a premium feature) allow you to add tags automatically to incoming posts based on various parameters of your own choosing (folders, keywords, etc.); it's very much like creating rules for incoming email (see below for more info). You can add tags manually, of course, but having automatic rules for tag assignment has been a big help for me in managing content as it comes in, syndication to send content out (tag-based RSS feeds), along with overall reading habits and workflow.

4. READ/UNREAD. I rely very heavily on the read/unread signaling in the navigation pane to let me know what I really need to read. In order to make that work, I use rules to mark most of the incoming non-school content as already read, leaving "unread" only those blogs and news sources that I am determined to keep up with no matter how busy school gets. You can set Inoreader to mark as "read" the items you scroll through in expanded view (or whatever views you want to use for scolling/reading), so that is how I manage to at least skim all the incoming student blog posts, tagging things as needed to go back and read later, leave comments, etc.

5. RULES. I use rules to separate out my students' blog posts into tag-based collections, with the tags automatically assigned based on keywords in the title (it just takes a little manual jiggling from me when a student makes a typo, leaves out the keyword, etc., but 99% of the time the automatic rule is all I need). I also use rules to mark most incoming new items from my personal learning network as "read" (see note above) since the read/unread distinction is how I manage my time spent at Inoreader. Rules are a premium feature and they are the reason why I opted to go for the "professional" service (unlimited rules). You can also use rules for other behaviors besides tagging and marking as read/unread as you can see in this screenshot of the rule creation interface:

6. DASHBOARDS. The customizable dashboard is a premium feature, and I find it very handy. You can even have multiple dashboards, although the dashboard is so easy to configure that I usually just reconfigure my dashboard on the fly rather than building separate dashboards. If you do have premium Inoreader, I'd recommend playing around with the dashboard options because they can indeed be useful, although I mostly rely on the navigation pane to do my reading/browsing.

7. STAR. I really like the starred feature which is automatically a "special folder" in Inordeader. I use that to run a "recently starred" widget in my personal blog for example (there is RSS for the star folder, and so I popped that into the RSS widget in Blogger).

8. GOOGLE+ and TWITTER. In addition to standard RSS, Inoreader supports subscriptions to Google+ accounts and Twitter accounts (it's a premium feature). This is very useful for me in creating the "omnifeed" which reflects posts from all my blogs, activity from my two Twitter accounts, and also Google+ posts. You can see the omnifeed at MythFolklore.net.

9. HTML CLIPPINGS TO PDF. My students' storytelling posts lend themselves to more leisurely reading offline. To manage that, I use the HTML clippings to display a gigantic webpage of posts (you can put hundreds of posts on a clippings page if you want), and then print-to-PDF, which gives me a nice PDF file of stories I can mark up in a PDF reader on my iPad. For example, here are 100 of the latest stories from my Spring 2015 Indian Epics class in a webpage that I can print to PDF (220 pages! wow!).

10. PREFERENCES. Explore the preferences. The options you have to configure the Inoreader environment are excellent IMO. I appreciate the responsive color coding (like "new since last visit" in addition to the standard unread), the ability to change font size (I need all the help I can get!), the keyboard shortcuts, and on and on.

And for the DML2015 preparation plan, I did a screencast: Laura Loves RSS.

Course Hub Pages with Inoreader

In preparation for DML2015 in June (and June is soon!), I did a massive redesign and clean-up of some course hub pages. Admitted, these course hub pages are really not something I use or that my students use (which is why I had neglected the pages; the students and I both have other ways of intersecting with the course — more on that later), but it is definitely something I need in order to try to give visitors a sense of how the courses work, and I am now thinking it might also be useful for the students at the very beginning of the semester for a kind of overview also!

You can see the results here:

• MLLL-3043 Mythology and Folklore
• MLLL-4993 Indian Epics

The idea is that these pages provide you with a basic overview of the courses. The main course hub page for each course shows the blog post feed in the left panel and a list of useful links in the right panel:

In addition to the all-posts feed you see there, I created some additional pages showing the blog comments feed, along with some specific types of posts for the classes: Reading Diary posts, Storytelling posts, along with their "Famous Last Words" posts (a free-form option for blogging about whatever). There are actually lots of other types of blog posts that the students are writing, but those are the main categories. During the semester, the feeds are full of new content every day, but now that the semester is over, it all feels very frozen in time. I'll be excited when the new semester starts up again in the fall, and the feeds come back to life!

Advantages and Disadvantages of an Aggregated Hub

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenge of how you "re-present" a network of independent blogs. By using an aggregator, you can get all the latest posts and their content, which is great, but you lose the distinctive personality of each blog. For example, in the screenshot above, here is that that student's blog post looks like in its natural setting:

To make those person-to-person connections, the students need to engage with the blogs directly (more on that later), rather than accessing the course through an aggregator: the blogs provide personal spaces that allow them to interact with one another as individuals, above and beyond the content of a specific post or comment. When you are at someone's blog, you can read their introduction post, look at their other writing, see what they have put in the blog sidebar, etc. etc. You are "in their world" when you visit their blog; the aggregator is just a gateway to get you to where you really need to go, and the aggregator is also essential for me to interact with the class overall (more on that later).

To see just how varied the blogs are, you can click on any post title in the post display area and go straight to that person's blog. They are all so different! You can also visit the blog list for each class and click to access the blogs that way.

Inoreader HTML Clippings

As you can see, the course hub pages are insanely simple: just a a feed display panel on the left, and some links on the right. I built the feed display panels using the magic of Inoreader's "HTML clippings" view. The customizable clippings view that I use is a premium feature (part of the $30/year package), but you can get the same effect by using the standard clipping presentation and adjusting your webpage design accordingly.

To start with, as students join the class and make a blog, I use Inoreader to subscribe to their blog post feed and also to their blog comments feed. I put the post feeds and comment feeds into folders in Inoreader, and I also configure Inoreader to automatically assign tags to incoming posts based on keywords. The rules are also a premium feature, but it would also be possible to do this by manually assigning the tags and/or subscribing to the label-specific RSS feeds for the students' blog and then putting those label-based feeds in a folder.

So, after you have your folders and tags chugging along, you can then syndicate that content publicly via RSS, HTML Clippings, or an OPML file. I used the HTML Clippings option to create the different pages in the course hub, showing either all the posts for a course (those are blogs in a folder) or all the posts for a specific course assignment. Here's how you syndicate a specific folder or tag:

First, right-mouse click on a folder or tag in the sidebar, and then choose "View Folder Information" (or "View Tag Information").

You will then see a screen that allows you to turn sharing on or off, and also to access the RSS, HTML, or OPML data for that folder (or tag):

If you choose the HTML Clip option, you will then see the various options you can use to configure the display, along with an http link that you can use or an iframe option you can use to insert the display inside another webpage, which is what I did for my course hub pages that are linked above:

That's all there is to it! There are a lot of things I like about Inoreader, and this easy way of sharing curated content is one of my favorites. For another application of this same approach, see my homepage at MythFolklore.net. The feed on that page is what I call my "omnifeed," since it combines content from my blogs, plus my two Twitter accounts, and also my Google+ posts, thanks to Inoreader's great Twitter and Google+ integration. Whoo-hoo! :-)

Screencast!

Yep, I made a screencast; it is for our DML2015 presentation support site. Maybe it will be useful: Laura Loves RSS.

New Google Site: Teaching with Inoreader

Given interested by others in how I'm using Inoreader, I decided that it would be more productive to collection my Inoreader-related items at a website, rather than at a blog: Teaching With Inoreader. I'm excited about this because it will give me a chance to re-acquaint myself with Google Sites, too, so that I will do a better job of helping my students as they work on their own Google Sites. So, on this page, I will keep regular updates about what I am posting at the new website that specifically pertain to my classes.

Here are the new posts as of November 23, 2014:

• Student Blogs and Comments. This explains how I set up the blog network by subscribing to student blog post feeds and comment feeds.
• Archiving Assignments. There are a few assignments that I want to archive after the class is over; here's how I save an assignment archive as a PDF.
• One-Time Fetch. The lack of updates for post content is the only real problem I had with Inoreader, but I found some good work-around solutions.
• My Rookie Mistakes. Learn from my mistakes, so you don't have to learn from your own! :-)

Inoreader: Keeping Up With All Those Blogs!

It was my great good fortune to learn about Inoreader right at the beginning of the semester; it's made working with the student blogs so much more fun than ever before. I'll be making changes to my course for Spring semester so that I can make even better use of that tool. Meanwhile, in this post, I'll start explaining how I am using Inoreader in my classes for Fall 2014.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION. Inoreader is an RSS reader with some very powerful features that allow me to keep up with hundreds of student blog posts each week. In particular, I am making use of the rules, tags, multiple display views, and HTML clippings. Rules are a "Plus" premium feature ($30/year), but all the other features are part of the free version.

DETAILS. I am doing some powerful things with Inoreader, but at the same time it is very simple to use. Here's how I got up and running:

1. Add Blogs. As the students create their blogs, I grab the RSS to add the feeds to Inoreader, with each class in a separate folder. OU IE is my Indian Epics class; OU MF is my Myth-Folklore class. As you can see, this gives me easy access to each student's blog when I am interested in looking at a given student's blog as opposed to looking at a collection of blog posts for a given assignment.

2. Create Rules. I set up rules to tag the incoming posts based on keywords in the subject lines. So, for example, storytelling posts in my Myth-Folklore class are tagged storytellingmf, and the HTML clippings feature lets me share posts with that tag.

3. Scan Incoming. I also have a rule to tag all incoming posts as "Incoming" which is just a temporary tag. Periodically throughout the day, I scan the posts labeled "Incoming," taking a quick look at the post, adjusting the tags as needed (sometimes students don't put the keywords in the subject lines), and removing the Incoming tag as I go along. This takes just a few minutes each day. I sometimes leave a comment for the student right then; sometimes I add a tag to remind myself to come back and check something, etc. It all depends on how much time I have! Here's what the tag area looks like - the autocomplete means that when I do need to add tags, it prompts me to be consistent with the tags I'm already using:

And that's all, folks! For those of you who are users of rules and tags to organize your email, Inoreader is allowing me to use exactly the same organizational strategies. At the same time, it provides powerful sharing opportunities because each tag has its own RSS feed and its own HTML clippings service.

In other posts, I'll explain more specifically some of the ways Inoreader is helping me with each of the different types of assignments which the students are publishing in their blogs. Just how I interact with the students' blogs and how the students interact with each other varies from assignment to assignment, and Inoreader is helping provide access, both for me and for the students, to the different assignment types.

HISTORY. I started out years ago using Bloglines for student blogs, and then for five years I used Ning, a group blogging platform; you can read more about that history here. As far as RSS readers go, I was a loyal fan of Google Reader, and I made good use of "bundles" then. I switched to Feedly when Google shut down Reader, but I missed my bundles! I put out a plea for help at Google+ when I realized how badly I needed something like Google Reader to manage all these new student blogs, and Stefan Heßbrüggen recommended Inoreader. I am lucky to be connected to so many smart folks online; Inoreader was exactly what I was looking for.

GOALS. These are the main goals that Inoreader is helping me with:

• Blog awareness. I am able to skim and scan, getting a good sense of all the blog posts as they come in.
• Blog organization. I can review the different types of blog posts systematically, learning from the posts, commenting, and also re-using them.
• Blog sharing. Being able to share the blog posts so that the students can get ideas and inspirations from each other is the best thing of all!

GENERAL THOUGHTS

For years I have been a wild admirer of ds106 and the aggregation/syndication tools that Alan Levine has been developing for WordPress environments. At the same time, I know that I am just not up for that technological adventure; I am a happy creator of web content, and thus an uber-nerd, but not much of a geek. I use hosted services like Blogger and PBWorks, and I am a big fan of javascript tools (like RotateContent.com) that let me embed and syndicate that hosted content. For my courses, though, without Google Reader's bundles, I was stumped. Inoreader came to the rescue! Although I am not able to work all the ds106 magic, it has let me come closer than I had ever dreamed possible without running my own WordPress installation.

One thing I like about my admittedly lazy use of hosted options is that it means I can share my strategies with everyone! Anything that I am doing in my courses, my students can turn around and do too, and I can recommend my strategies to anyone with an Internet connection and some time to play around with these hosted tools and services.

Of course, I know that no hosted service will last forever, and in the past ten years, I've seen services come and go, including dearly beloved services like Delicious and Google Reader. But I've also come to learn that sometimes the demise of a beloved service is what galvanizes change, in a good way. It was the demise of Delicious that prompted me to create my eStorybook Central archive of student work, for example, whereas before I had done that with Delicious; eStorybook Central has turned out to be much more useful to me as a project archive than Delicious ever was! Likewise, the end of Ning threw me into a bit of a panic, but it has provoked the biggest and best changes that I've ever made to my courses.

Of course, at the moment I am hoping that Inoreader sticks around for a very, very long time — and I can tell there are still lots of Inoreader tricks I have yet to learn. I am so excited about tweaking my assignments next semester in order to take full advantage of Inoreader's powerful help!