A learning object repository in motion (feeling a little bit aggRSSive)

Update: I meant to hold off posting the link until I added more feeds to the collection and polished a couple things. I also hope to point out more features which we need to make easier to find. But I’m also easily swayed by even the slightest bit of pressure. Keep in mind this is unfinished, and please be kind.

Update 2: Should have held off posting that link. If you’d like more info please send me an email.

Since I’m blogging, I thought I’d take a moment to preview what I’ll likely be posting on for the next few weeks (or months). In a half hour or so we’ll be giving a soft launch of a new resource developed by my office (more on that process later) as a poster session for the UBC Town Hall.

Imagine that each of the tags in the image above (biology, bioinformatics, etc…) was linked to a set of RSS feeds drawn from learning resource collections, weblogs, journals, library collections, news sources, or whatever else users might find useful in an educational context. Users can add new feeds to the collection and apply existing tags or create new ones much as they do in Flickr or del.icio.us.

This is just a small piece of what aggRSSive does for feed-crazy educators. But I want to start by pointing at this functionality as it directly addresses what I find to be the biggest adoption challenge for instructors related to RSS — which is finding high-quality RSS feeds in their disciplines and areas of interest.

We just froze the coding process yesterday, and now I need to do my part — stocking the site with more feeds and slapping some initial tags on them, and beginning to write up the help documentation (which was hard to do until now, as the functionality of the site seemed to be changing on a daily basis). So I will be holding off on linking to the site just yet. But for me, at least, it’s shaping up to be a long, hot, aggRSSive summer.