You need this tool.
Last week the participants in CHNM’s One Week | One Tool workshop have created a WordPress plug-in called Anthologize that lets anyone using WordPress to create tangible publications from digital content. With Anthologize installed, you can grab text from your blog, your various feeds, other people’s blogs and feeds, and produce a book, a .pdf, or a variety of other formats for publication, whether digital or analog.
I got to participate in the live announcement on Digital Campus today and was not a participant in the process, so I’m coming to this as a new user. As I mentioned on the podcast, I can’t wait to get back from vacation and install this plugin on both this blog and on my class blog for the fall.
I’m especially excited about Anthologize as a tool for teaching. I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the work product we demand from our students — papers, exams, presentations, etc. — because that work product doesn’t really do much for our students once the class is over. This fall I’m teaching a new course (for me) on the history of human trafficking, and I had already planned to have my students produce a white paper on human trafficking that they could begin circulating into the policy discussions on the subject. With Anthologize I now have a tool I can use to help my students produce that final work product easily and quickly.
I’m also excited about this tool because for years I’ve wanted a good way to convert blog posts to a book format — I’m old school that way — and now I have one. Just imagine, Edwired, the book.
To read more on Anthologize read what Dan has to say on the subject, where you can also see a book he produced during the live podcast (just to give you an idea how easily this can work).