OUseful Info

Disaggregating an MIT OpenCourseware Course into Separate RSS Feeds

Picking up on a couple of points raised in An MIT OpenCourseWare Course via an OPML Feed, I've atomised the MIT OpenCourse Course CMS.610 / CMS.922 Media Industries and Systems, Spring 2006 a little further and replaced some of the OPML items with RSS feeds.

In particular, I've replaced the list of video games with a feed containing those items pulled from an Amazon Listmania list via a third party Listmania2RSS service (which I've used before in a similar context: OpenLearn/OCW Reading Lists).

I've also created a youTube channel with trailers/reviews of some of the example video games mentioned in the course. Applying the bookmarklet mentioned in Grazring YouTube Favourites Playlists to the youTube channel page creates a static snapshot (i.e. not live:-( RSS feed of the playlist, which can also be mixed into the course OPML (or view the course via grazr):

Finally, I added another Listmania list, this time for the books cited in the course.

..and as an afterthought, a link to a delicious feed pointing to a list of bookmarks of the books on the reading list that appear in Google Books. [Latency on replicating bookmarks across the delicious servers is really becoming an issue, methinks?]

Whilst I haven't done this (yet!), it's trivial to pipe the Listmania lists into an online shop, courtesy of something like Amazon aStores.

This incremental disaggregation approach (?!) is a route I'm keen on exploring further as a way of identifying patterns that can be used in reverse as exemplar mashup strategies, by aggregating content from reusable raw components, rather than disaggregating it into reusable component parts.

The disaggregation step does, however, have the beneficial side effect of producing reusable components from effectively closed (i.e. not trivially mashable or remixable) open content ;-)

PS for another take on educational mashup activity, check out the Open, Connected, and Social: mashups wiki page.

PPS for a more recent take on opencourseware OPML feed bundles, check out MIT open courseware for High Schools feeds and Yale OpenCourseware Feeds. Both these posts use Yahoo pipes to scrape ocw sites and automatically produce OPML feed bundles for the listed courses. For a general overview of my ocw feed experiments, see Feeding from Opencourseware.

Posted by ajh59 at April 25, 2007 11:39 AM