I recently posted about some OU Netvibes Modules which in part resulted from a few email discussions I'd been having about Netvibes with other folks here in the OU. Those conversations in turn arose - in part again - from chatting about the recent PLE gigs I've been to.
It seems like Martin Weller (who has just come out as a blogger at Ed Techie) has also been thinking that Netvibes may be a useful as a demonstrator, (even though it looks as if we are committed to MyMoodle as a student homepage in the new VLE).
So out of all of this, I was wondering, would it be worth getting a few people together, doing a Netvibes briefing (if required) and then having a bit of a play to see where we can push it? Holding the session over the course of an afternoon, with a developer/hacker or two around to on the spot ad hoc prototype Netvibes modules if necessary, could be very fruitful I think.
The session would ideally have a set of required outcomes:
a) a set of shareable Netvibes tabs capable of acting as:
b) identification of current services that do not have feeds; it would also be sensible to scope out what information they should expose in that way;
c) identification of feeds from services that do not yet exist but that would be really neat to have ;-)
If time allowed, it would also be useful to mock up feeds inspired by items identified under b and c with static files, (or generate the feed for b by scraping) so they could be demonstrated in the demo tabs.
Armed with the demos and a shopping list of required feeds, we'd have a better understanding of the PLE nature of Netvibes, a set of tabs that could in principle be used to support OU activity, a better idea of the ways in which feeds can be used to drive content into Moodle and a clearer understanding of what other service related feeds might be beneficial were they available.
Alternatively, we could launch a mini-internal competition, in which individuals would be free to post one or more shareable demo tabs, as I did in the post mentioned right at the start...
If anyone's interested in this competition, I'm sure I could find a prize or two somewhere (a packet of Polos, perhaps...;-)
Posted by ajh59 at June 21, 2006 10:08 PM