Back to RSS - Week 6
Realizing how quickly this class has progressed through a plethora of content and new experiences, I welcome this week’s blog to reflect! The one aspect to which I keep returning is the whole notion of RSS. Six weeks ago I had never heard of the acronym or concept and now it is a part of my daily life – how could I live without bloglines! I return to Mary Harrsch’s article, RSS: The next killer app for education, and her description of RSS being the next (after e-mail) “program that provides the capability for the average person to use technology to solve everyday problems and enrich their lives.” What a phenomenal tool awaiting our friends, family, colleagues, and students – I don’t know about you all, but when I mention “RSS” to folks, I usually get blank stares, so I feel like a real pioneer!
As well, this week I found two blog postings that seemed to relate. Tom Hoffman comments that “there is more excitement about the potential for technology than there is over the reality of technology.” This contemplation is a result of an informal poll of educators (who in the 1990’s were heavily involved in integrating new technologies in the classroom) noting that most had heard about blogs, some had read blogs, but very few had published them. The numbers were worse for questions about podcasts and social bookmarking. So how do we re-create the enthusiasm for this new generation of educational technology tools? Will it be a ground swell from the grass roots? I noticed that FETC (Florida Educational Technology Conference) appears to have down-sized from when I used to attend regularly in the late 90’s.
The other blog, Will Richardson’s Class Content Aggregation, reflects on the ways that both tagging and aggregating can bring all different types of content together. He suggests that students get a unique tag for anything they find relevant about that particular course which is collected and shared … similar to what we are doing with the UFET tag for this class! One of the links on this blog led me to another extension of the RSS concept – BlogBridge Reading Lists, described as a collection of feeds, usually about a single topic, which someone has put together for the benefit of others. The power of RSS is simply awesome and although I venture to say Harrsch’s prediction of RSS as the next killer app is true, I hope it catches on across a broader audience (especially educators!) soon.
As well, this week I found two blog postings that seemed to relate. Tom Hoffman comments that “there is more excitement about the potential for technology than there is over the reality of technology.” This contemplation is a result of an informal poll of educators (who in the 1990’s were heavily involved in integrating new technologies in the classroom) noting that most had heard about blogs, some had read blogs, but very few had published them. The numbers were worse for questions about podcasts and social bookmarking. So how do we re-create the enthusiasm for this new generation of educational technology tools? Will it be a ground swell from the grass roots? I noticed that FETC (Florida Educational Technology Conference) appears to have down-sized from when I used to attend regularly in the late 90’s.
The other blog, Will Richardson’s Class Content Aggregation, reflects on the ways that both tagging and aggregating can bring all different types of content together. He suggests that students get a unique tag for anything they find relevant about that particular course which is collected and shared … similar to what we are doing with the UFET tag for this class! One of the links on this blog led me to another extension of the RSS concept – BlogBridge Reading Lists, described as a collection of feeds, usually about a single topic, which someone has put together for the benefit of others. The power of RSS is simply awesome and although I venture to say Harrsch’s prediction of RSS as the next killer app is true, I hope it catches on across a broader audience (especially educators!) soon.
posted by M Coleman at
2/17/2006 05:50:00 PM
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