Lindseaks last blog post..I float on tag clouds and blog fog

Adrienne’s comments resonate with me because I think the key to selling RSS to teachers doesn’t start with showing them how to follow blogs, but instead in following the other content generated by their kids.

And I’m pretty sure that for me, that will begin with showing teachers how to follow edits to student work in our wiki, our blogs and our Google Docs.

Most of the teachers that I know are open to the idea of using web tools to create content and opportunities for communication between students. Their only concern: They want to monitor everything their kids write/say/do and are intimidated by the size of that task.

Considering that the wiki service we use has RSS feeds, Voicethread—another tool that’s taking off in our building—has RSS feeds and Google Docs, a tool that we’re interested in pursuing through Google Apps for Education, has RSS feeds, I think RSS may just be the hook that gets teachers into using digital tools in their classrooms because it removes the primary barrier that keeps them from using those tools to begin with.

I’m beginning to think that teaching teachers about strategies and tools for information management should be the starting point for introducing Web 2 to teachers. Every teacher, no matter how traditional, is doing research and writing with students in classrooms.

RSS makes that work easier…..and by default, makes RSS a tool non-tech-savvy teachers might just embrace.

Neat conversation…Thanks for starting it!
Bill

Bill Ferriters last blog post..Saint Carl, Civil Disobedience and Irresponsible Discord

To ease your guilt (were you raised a Roman Catholic?) you can always place 20, perhaps 30, ‘essential’ blogs in a ‘read’ folder and the remainder in other folders with titles like ‘maybe read’ or ‘ease my guilt’.

Cheers, John.

John Larkins last blog post..Lizard saliva dessert dish was a delight!

Here’s that draft:

The title is a riff off of Nietzsche’s “God is dead” zinger inThe Gay Science (and later Zarathustra). While I knew what I meant by it - a bit of hyperbole to force some thinking about the effectiveness of any sacred cow - it still stinks as a title. My only defense is that I’ve been teaching titles, introductions, advanced sentence patterns, and the use of figurative language to all of my classes rabidly for the last three weeks - and it spilled over into trying out exercises in allusive titles and such in this post. So mea culpa on snappy writing with flimsy accuracy.

That being said, I don’t think it’s too unclear in this post that I’m not denying the usefulness of RSS as much as of RSS aggregators (”readers”) - particularly in introductory workshops with teachers or students.

I am using my reader less myself. I’m not seeing more than maybe 3% of students and teachers to whom I’ve presented it using it at all months (for teachers) or a year (for students) later. So I do question the over-emphasis of it in workshops.

Question, mind you. (Can I retitle this “Is RSS Dying?” - and if no, can we settle for “Is RSS an Orphan?”)

Good answers come in the comments in the thread below. They strongly defend the uses of RSS, and have given me pause to consider my own issues with it - my own “abuses.”

John Larkin’s identification of the Reader glutted with too many feeds is probably the most accurate diagnosis of my RSS neurosis: I subscribe to way too many feeds, partly out of friendly loyalty to people, partly out of a feed appetite larger than my stomach can digest. I know it sounds silly, but I feel like I’m betraying somebody when I unsubscribe.

That gets further compounded when all those feeds turn into literally thousands of unread posts. This causes the same kind of feeling in me as does a sink overflowing with dirty dishes or a refrigerator with foods-cum-science projects (remember college days? Mine were that way, anyway.) I just avoid it - and the dishes pile more and the mold grows a ‘fro. So I avoid more. Don’t open that fridge.

So thanks, John, for advice that snapped me out of this condition. I’m going to thin my reader down to a manageable few, and see if that revives my faith in this cow.

But still. Rodd Lucier….TBC….

I like Adrienne’s and Arthus Erea’s ideas. I feel that the old RSS reader is a powerful tool. When I share Google Reader or similar with teachers, etc I emphasize how they can subscribe to a wide variety of material, education and otherwise. It can become a one-stop information shop.

Participants subscribe to news services, sporting teams, information sites, television show sites, flickr pages, del.icio.us links etc. They subscribe to some blogs as well.

I then illustrate how powerful a search of the reader can be in seeking examples or discussions on a particular topic. A reader can evolve into a considerable body of knowledge.

The ability to share and publish subscriptions is useful as well.

True, there is an ocean of new blogs (if you do not mind my borrowing your maritime metaphor Clay) that will seemingly sink our RSS-readers if we attempt to subscribe to them all. We cannot hold back the tide. Unless of course someone invents a new cool tool called Kanute, Cnute, Kanoot, Knoot, or something like that. This new tool would intelligently manage what we read in our RSS reader according to our whims or needs and push back that digital tide.

Of course, we can treat our RSS readers like we now treat the Internet. I only regularly visit a few web sites now. Years ago I surfed to everything. My bookmarks were endless. I use about 10 bookmarks now. I think we need to treat our blog feeds in a similar way. Read what you really need. Nothing more.

Cheers, John

I was surprised with this read. Among all the perspectives out there, RSS is still unknown to some of my teachers, tried and abandoned by some, and used by others.

We recently started a school district social network for the teachers. One asked me, “I don’t know if I want to use this unless it has RSS.”

I smiled.

I use Twitter, too, but differently that some do. I use it to record the steps of my day; my colleagues use it similarly. Following us wouldn’t be too… interesting to most. But occasionally I will throw-out a link.

The larger question is, are you willing to give-up on RSS? Is there not potential for student use (i.e., creating feeds for them?, them creating ones for you?)? RSS, as you later noted, is a technology that likely isn’t going away, but newsreaders are?

I’m not sure. Carrying around an iPhone myself, it’s very convenient to whip that out and pull up articles that mean something to me. My point is… we each have our mechanisms of dealing with the abundance of information online, and we ought to be teaching these strategies to students. But RSS is not the foe, it’s the friend (with, I might add, it’s friend folksonomy).

Eh, my 2¢.

This comment from Darren’s thread (to Jethro, who took me to task for this post’s title, but did it nicely) sort of addresses some of your comment:

@Jethro, (Hi ) Did I say RSS was too new? I don’t recall that. In a sense, I think RSS is too old now. Newer tools that are easier on the non-geek, I’m arguing, might be better for evangelizing to non-geeks (the large majority of our workshop and classroom audiences).

Again, I’m talking PD (and classroom - let’s not forget that the whole point of teaching this to teachers is to get them to educate their students about it). I just don’t think RSS will ever “come to life” for most PD and classroom attendees. And I think there are newer alternatives that might hook people more - and get them ready (only the willing) for aggregators.

It’s a pull v. push thing, in a sense.

The “RSS is Dead” thing was just a bit of hyperbole alluding to Nietzsche’s famous “God is Dead” declaration. I was hinting that maybe we worship Readers too much, and don’t notice that the rest of the world doesn’t seem to.

Arthus, how do you put Diigo things into RSS? Subscribe to Diigo group entries or what?