Comments on: CFHE12 Week 4 Analysis: Blog post comments (notes on comment aggregation for cMOOCs)

By: Designing a Comment Scraper for MOOCs (and other animals) « Connection not Content

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:42:25 +0000

[...] their inclusion can considerably lengthen the display. Martin Hawksey (in an impressive post on blog post comments) mentions in the context of MOOCs, that, ” … it might be useful to know where the [...]

By: Valerie Taylor

Valerie Taylor — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 16:52:15 +0000

It is an interesting problem. From the feedback in the early cMOOCs, there are would-be participants who aren’t prepared to accept and manage the degree of control over their learning environment that is key to cMOOC innovation.

More recently, facilitators aren’t giving participants the opportunity to figure it out. The latest round of MOOCs have highjacked the name and forced it into more conventional LMS technology that really doesn’t support some of the freedoms that ought to be left to the participants.

As you point out – this needs work…

By: cMOOC participation and feedback « open learning

cMOOC participation and feedback « open learning — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 16:26:30 +0000

[...] response to Blog post comments (notes on comment aggregation for cMOOCs) I wrote… Looking at this from a different perspective – that of the learner / lurker, [...]

By: Martin Hawksey

Martin Hawksey — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:33:02 +0000

Hi Valerie – It’s a very valid point. I think at the end of the day it’s not about imposing a particular way on learners but as far as possible letting them do what they like. The challenge then is creating the tools that can adapted to many different learning styles. The starting point is developing something that covers the majority of use cases and then working from there. Would you agree?

Martin

By: Valerie Taylor

Valerie Taylor — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:05:54 +0000

Looking at this from a different perspective – that of the learner / lurker, rather than commenting on the actual post, it is preferable to post “comments” or “replies” in my own blog.

If I post a comment on your blog to your post, I have no record of it. If I post in my own blog with a reference to your post (and hence pingback), then I have a trail of my own thinking and participation in the cMOOC.

By: Gordon Lockhart

Gordon Lockhart — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:31:50 +0000

I’ve only run the Scraper locally so far – the project actually started as an exercise in learning Python and developed from there. Scraperwiki seems a great idea – I’ll now look into its possibilities – thanks!

By: Martin Hawksey

Martin Hawksey — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 09:52:10 +0000

Thanks Gordon for pointing me to your work. It’s nice to be able to join the dots and see who else is interested in this area. Are you/do you run your script in the cloud (my immediate thought was if it was possible to run on scraperwiki, having a public store of the data would make it easy for other to reues the data)?

By: Gordon Lockhart

Gordon Lockhart — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:37:16 +0000

Very impressive Martin – and I share your reservations about the gRSShopper commenting system. This was at least partly why I experimented with a ‘Comment Scraper’ during the last part of the Change11 MOOC. ( http://gbl55.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/change11-mooc-comment-scraper-update/ ) The idea was to bring together brief summarised versions of recent blog posts along with their comments to give a quick impression of current activity – what it’s about and where it’s at. Since then I’ve updated the program (uses Python Feedparser) so that comments can be aggregated and pingbacks detected (I’m also uncertain about 100% reliability on pingback detection). It doesn’t use the “individual comment feed urls” – comments and post headings are matched only from the 2 main WP RSS files. I hope to blog about it all very shortly – I need to look at your recent contributions in detail as I’m not at all familiar with most of the tools you mention!