Blogging and RSS
Blogging has many advantages in and out of the classroom. The article The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom by David Huffaker discusses some of these. I think that blogging is a great way to share information and hold online conversations on focused topics. The idea behind a blog being something that has a main text, a title, and a way for comments to communicate with the author and others has grown in epic proportions. I think that storytelling through blogs is good for some purposes, but does not always use blogs to their full potential. In a classroom such as ours, I use blogging to communicate and discuss information in a one way manor. I allow for comments on the blog, but nobody seems to respond to the entries. From this perspective it can be shown that blogs may not be as beneficial in the classroom as they could be. However, I think that for a classroom that is small such as our own, it can be very beneficial, but only if there is more collaboration and discussion on the blogs. If the bloggers would all discuss different topics and respond to each others, I believe that the blogging experience could be better. On the other hand, the story telling method can also work in many cases. The uses of blogs really needs to be customized to particular needs. For this classes needs, for example, the current method works fine because the things that need to be taken out of the class are responded to individually in the blogs. The article describes how young so many of the bloggers are and cites two studies. I agree with these findings, but also feel that I should point out that there are many blogs from older bloggers that are very popular because of the topics they discuss and how they can only be related to older people and students who are interested in the fields being described in the postings. In other words, the quantity of blogs does not always represent the same quality.
The Blogliness RSS Aggregator is a very nice product. I have used it in the past, but had preferred Google reader due to some specific features that I had not seen in other aggregators. On taking a second look at the reader for this class, it seems that there have been many improvements. There are many of these services out there and they seem to all have their own special abilities. The online aggregators are nice because they naturally allow for multi-platform use. On the other hand, downloadable programs can give better features and more direct control over the information. Again, customization is key and depends on the user preferences. I have subscribed to many feeds, especially technology ones. I love reading about tech news and really enjoy the website digg.com. This website gives users the ability to decide what is and is not news. People vote on stories in the form of "diggs" and can also give the thumbs down to stories to control the quality of content. When a story is popular enough, it makes front page. If the story gets too many negative votes, such as a lame news article or spam, it will be buried so people do not have to waste their time with it. This idea has been successful and is similar to community controlled Wiki articles. I did not subscribe to all of the feeds on my RSS feed at the time I created it. Instead I transfered many of them from another reader in the standard OPML format. RSS in itself is, in my opinion, one of the best new technologies to hit the internet. It gives people the ability to skip the website that the content resides on, and instead go directly to the content itself. This gives views extremely fast and direct content without having to go through the website filled with distracting ads and other media. RSS also is great for podcasts and other sequential short clips of information. RSS is going to be a widely used technology in the future because of its great benefits and time saving potential.
The Blogliness RSS Aggregator is a very nice product. I have used it in the past, but had preferred Google reader due to some specific features that I had not seen in other aggregators. On taking a second look at the reader for this class, it seems that there have been many improvements. There are many of these services out there and they seem to all have their own special abilities. The online aggregators are nice because they naturally allow for multi-platform use. On the other hand, downloadable programs can give better features and more direct control over the information. Again, customization is key and depends on the user preferences. I have subscribed to many feeds, especially technology ones. I love reading about tech news and really enjoy the website digg.com. This website gives users the ability to decide what is and is not news. People vote on stories in the form of "diggs" and can also give the thumbs down to stories to control the quality of content. When a story is popular enough, it makes front page. If the story gets too many negative votes, such as a lame news article or spam, it will be buried so people do not have to waste their time with it. This idea has been successful and is similar to community controlled Wiki articles. I did not subscribe to all of the feeds on my RSS feed at the time I created it. Instead I transfered many of them from another reader in the standard OPML format. RSS in itself is, in my opinion, one of the best new technologies to hit the internet. It gives people the ability to skip the website that the content resides on, and instead go directly to the content itself. This gives views extremely fast and direct content without having to go through the website filled with distracting ads and other media. RSS also is great for podcasts and other sequential short clips of information. RSS is going to be a widely used technology in the future because of its great benefits and time saving potential.
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