A long, long time ago (maybe 6 or 7 years now) I taught an elective ESL class centered around a student newspaper. We tried various formats including weekly, monthly, and quarterly editions, which ranged from 2 to 32 pages. We also experimented with various online editions, but at the time that mostly consisted of cutting and pasting the documents into HTML pages.
Fast-forward to 2011 and look how online publishing has changed. Blogs are ubiquitous, if not approaching passé. Everyone but my Mom has a Facebook page. (Don’t worry, my aunts fill her in). And many people get news, sports scores, Twitter posts, friends’ Facebook updates, and other information of interest pushed directly to their smartphones.
It’s no surprise, then, that a website like paper.li has found its niche. The slogan for paper.li is Create your newspaper. Today. Essentially, paper.li is an RSS aggregator in the form of a newspaper. RSS aggregators are nothing new (see iGoogle, My Yahoo!, etc.). As the name implies, the user selects a variety of different feeds from favorite blogs, people on Twitter, Facebook friends, etc. and aggregates the updates onto one page.
The twist with with paper.li is that the aggregated page looks very much like a newspaper — at least a newspaper’s website. For people not on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr, paper.li might feel much more comfortable. Also, publicizing one’s pages seems to be built right in to paper.li’s sourcecode. I say that because I first learned of paper.li when I read a tweet that said a new edition of that person’s paper was out featuring me. How flattering! Of course, I had to take a look.
Would paper.li be a good platform to relaunch a student newspaper? It might. If students have multiple blogs, paper.li could certainly aggregate the most recent posts into one convenient location. Other feeds could also be easily incorporated as well. (Think of this as akin to your local community newspaper printing stories from the Associated Press.) The most recent news stories about your city or region, updates from your institution’s website, and photos posted to Flickr tagged with your city or school name could each be a column in your paper.li paper right beside the articles crafted by the students themselves. You could even include updates from other paper.li papers.
To see examples of paper.li papers, visit the paper.li website. (And note that .li is the website suffix — no need to type .com no matter how automatically your fingers try to do so.) You can search paper.li for existing papers to see what is possible. A search for ESL, for example, brought up 5 pages of examples, some with hundreds of followers. Take a look. You might just get an idea for your own paper.li.
ESL Technology.com 