Last Tuesday, Cole walked into my office and sketched out a picture of a page that would not only aggregate content from blogs@psu, but also pull in related content and media from around the social web.
On Wednesday, I modified the blog search template to include these ideas
On Friday, it went into production. Check out the page on "democracy".
It was really easy to make this change. The point of this post is not to toot my horn in how quickly this idea was realized. The point is to highlight another example of the benefits of a platform we can easily build on to realize our ideas. All the details on this new page, and my ideas on where this is all might be going will have to wait for another time.
I am a very good sketch artist! Working on this last week was so much fun ... seeing how we got excited and worked together to invent something new so quickly was really energizing. Goes to show that we are making killer progress across the board on this platform. My interest in making this happen was as much a demonstration of the flexibility of the environment as it was to see how we could encourage more community involvement. Great work!
How can I exploit this for my Honors course? I would like to alert my students to any content at Blogs@PSU related to, say, politics, or feminism, for example. Let me think about what I might want to search on, but how could I set one up?
This is built into the standard cross-blog search. Just search for the terms you are interested in, and you will get the page with the blogs@psu terms as well as content from across the social web.
http://blogs.psu.edu/search/
The search results page is bookmarkable, sharable link. You can do the search and link to the resulting page in your blog or other site.