There's been quite a bit of email to and fro amongst the project team while this site is being developed. There are two major issues at the moment.

The first is how to aggregate content (via RSS) from existing sources and bringing it into mashedlc in a meaningful way. What this means in practice is that I have an existing blog, rather than having to reproduce the same content in multiple places, or to have to decide does this content live here or there (my other blog), I can write content and publish it in one place. Then via the magic of RSS this can be bought into this site. I can use a specific category in my existing (WordPress) blog, so only those posts somehow relevant to the DLC project are aggregatged. Once in this site this content should be automagically added to the blog under my username here, and to the project blog.

One of the key features of a Web 2.0 education engine/system/paradigm is the ability to write and publish (in blogs there is no distance between the former and the latter) in one location and then weave and build content via RSS. So if each project member has a blog, then rather than having to write in two places you keep writing in your existing research and/or teaching blog and simply allow content to be pulled into here.

The advantage for mashedlc is that the project blog here will collect all relevant content from distributed locations and authors. This adds value to our work as individuals, and to this project courtesy of the qualitative changes that aggregation allow. If the system can't manage this then the model is fundamentally broken - Web 2.0 (including for education) is about letting content by where it's authors place it and then remixing it (if you like) via lightweight but robust protocols like RSS into new formations. If you have to have a new account here, and have to manually write and publish here, rather than your existing sites (my flickr, blip.tv, blog, delicious and citeulike accounts for instance) then inspite of the social and network aspects it is just another institutionally centric model.

I'll write about the other problem later. My ten month old daughter is pleading for food.