Interesting Happenings at BYU

I saw this earlier today over at groups.drupal.org --

Kyle Matthews and Clint Rogers built a Drupal site in suppport of a web analytics class. The site aggregates student blogs and expert blogs; this way, everyone blogs from their chosen blogging platform, and their feed gets imported into the course site. In other words, people use whatever blogging tool they are currently using, and the software running the course (in this case, Drupal) adapts to the participant. This is a nice contrast to the usual approach, where all participants must adapt to the structure required by the LMS.

The site was built using the FeedAPI and the Feed Element Mapper. We have talked about organizing classes and building Open Educational Repositories like this in the past, and our main proof of concept site has been humming along for the last few months with no issues at all.

There has been some great development behind the FeedAPI; just last week, the folks over at Development Seed put out another screencast showing how they are extending the functionality even further.