As part of the JISC OER Rapid Innovation Programme we’ve been experimenting with monitoring project blogs by gluing together some scripts in Google Spreadsheets. First there was Using Google Spreadsheets to dashboard project/course blog feeds #oerri which was extended to include social activity around blog posts.
As the programme comes to a close projects will soon be thinking about submitting their final reports. As part of this projects agreed to submit a selection of their posts with a pre-identified set of tags shown below as a MS Word document.
tag | structure |
projectplan | detailed project plan, either in the post or as an attachment |
aims | reminder of the objectives, benefits and deliverables of your project |
usecase | link to / reproduce the use case you provided in your bid |
nutshell | 1-2 paragraph description in accessible language, an image, a 140 character description [1 post per project] |
outputs | update posts on outputs as they emerge, with full links/details so that people can access them |
outputslist | end of project: complete list of outputs, refer back to #projectplan and note any changes [1 post per project] |
lessonslearnt | towards of the end of the project, a list of lessons that someone like you would find useful |
impact | end of project: evidence of benefits and impact of your project and any news on next steps |
grandfinale | this is the follow up to the nutshell post. a description in accessible language, and a 2 minute video [1 post per project] |
And here are the auto-generated reports for each project:
Issues
I should say that these are not issues I have with the OERRI projects, but my own issues I need to solve to make this solution work in a variety of contexts.
- Missing tags/categories – you’ll see the dashboard has a number of blanks. In some cases it’s not the projects fault (as the majority of projects used WordPress installs it was easier to focus on these), but in other cases projects mix tags/categories or just forget to include them
- Non-WordPress – 3 of the projects don’t use WordPress, so other ways to grab the content are required
- RSS Summary instead of full feed – ‘Linked data approaches to OERs’ uses a summary in their RSS feed rather than full-text. As this script relies on a full text feed it can’t complete the report (one of my pet hates is RSS summary feeds – common people you’re supposed to be getting the word out, not putting up barriers.)
Hopefully it’s not a bad start and if nothing else maybe it’ll encourage projects to sort out their tagging. So what have I missed … questions welcomed.
Lorna M. Campbell
This is sooo clever 🙂
Martin Hawksey
So the issue here is project blogs that aren’t wordpress. How could you do this programme wide without having to specify the platform projects use? My thought was if JISC used the same technique as ds106 of aggregating blog posts using the FeedWordPress plugin which takes a mirror of the post and stores it in a central wordpress install it would be easy to generate reports. The issue would still be projects not tagging their posts correctly, but it would be a step in the right direction
Visualizing cMOOC data: Extracting and analysing data from FeedWordPress part 1 #ds106 #NodeXL JISC CETIS MASHe
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Moses
Right now it sounds like Movable Type is the
preferred blogging platform out there right now.
(from what I’ve read) Is that what you are using on your blog?