Blogs at Penn State as a platform for re-usable content

Just had a conversation with Cole that blew my mind. It is really so simple that at first it may not seem like a revelation. Or it may make you slap your forehead for not truly seeing something that was right in front of your face all along.

When you blog, bookmark with del.icio.us, upload or tag a photo with flickr you are creating a piece of content that can be repurposed, republished, and mashed up.

This is not a new concept to the scads of people embedding youtube videos on their myspace pages or their most recent flickr pictures on the sidebar of their blog.

We can use this at the University.

Learning materials can be authored using a blog tool and an embed code could be provided to include it in the LMS.  Ever changing lists of online resources can be managed using a blog or del.iciou.us. Embed code could place it right within the course materials. Change the content at the source and change the content everywhere.

Combine blog posts from students to make a class blog. Mashup blogs of individuals to make department-wide blogs. Combine various tags from various systems to make one meta-resource.

This is partly the eduGlu concept, but another part is the re-usability factor from a content management perspective. One piece of content can be used by another content management system. An instructor's grading policy can be authored in movable type, then displayed on the syllabi of her various courses in Angel.  Information about her research can be created on her blog, but then also displayed on her department's website as well in any of her classes to which it may be pertinent.

What we need now are a set of tools to enable the sharing and combination of all the content that exists out there. Google reader has a nice feature (hat tip to Cole for showing me this) that allows users to create a meta-blog of sorts, mashing together a collection of feeds. Cole and I were imagining a plugin for movable type that will provide an embed code for any piece of content or collection of pieces of content to enable its reuse.