Archiving course posts and comments
Scenario
John has completed a course where all the students were using their personal blogs to post the weekly assignments. Besides blogs the students were using various Web 2.0 sites to share the course-related information. These sites include Delicious, SlideShare, Scribd, Flickr and YouTube. In all of these sites the students used the same tag with course-related content.
John is really happy with the way how active the students were during the course. However, he is worried that part of the course-related content will be taken down over the time. He would like to have an offline copy of all the student blogs and course-related activities in other Web 2.0 environments. Saving these web pages manually is far too much work.
John finds out that he can use EduFeedr for making an archive of the course. URL's for all the student blogs have been already added to EduFeedr. Now John has to add URL's for the pages that aggregate all content with course tag from Delicious, SlideShare and other Web 2.0 environments that they used.
When all the URL's are submitted he will start the archiving. After a few minutes he is done. Now it is possible to browse all the blog posts and comments inside EduFeedr. Also the bookmarks from Delicious and photos from Flickr were archived. Unfortunately EduFeedr wasn’t able to download content from web sites that have a Flash player for displaying the content (YouTube, SlideShare and others). For these environments only links to the course-related content are saved in the archive.
Questions about the scenario
- Did the scenario wake-up any thoughts?
- Could you image yourself to the role of the teacher?
- Is there something you would like to change in the scenario?
Comments from the readers
Archiving student work is important, but I wonder if you will start over-loading edufeedr. Maybe put this down as a nice-to-have for version 2?
I think archiving the course is important, but if EduFeedr doesn't scale well enough to handle it right away, it should allow you to save the package to your local computer at least. You should be able to select which components of the course you want to save: course outline/syllabus/assignments; student blogs; imported links from delicious, etc. A barebones copy of the course materials without much of the old student work would be useful for another teacher to adapt to a new course on the same topic.
