EDUCEDGE,

Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)

One Response to “ RSSFeeds ”

1. # 1    educedge Says:
   November 12th, 2008 at 8:06 am

   What follows is a SLED-based thread on my question regarding RSSfeeds. I find Alan Levine’s answer clear, to the point and quite reassuring. I had to share it with others who are either late adopter, or like me earlier adopters but seriously getting wary of all the gizmos supposedly there to save time. Enjoy:

   “I have a confession to make: I’ve been avoiding RSSfeeds for fear of getting either choked by the amount of info coming my way, slave to ‘information ‘ (you know the panicky feeling of withdrawal when you don’t or can’t access the internet for 2 days in a row?), or even simply not getting to actually do what I am supposed to do because I have not gone through my feeds yet.

   So my question really is: how do you manage the amount of info coming out of your feeds? How much time do you dedicate to it? You do develop a scanning skill or simply limit to the first 5 top stories?

   Curious but protective of my time,
   S.”

   Alan Levine answered:
   “Sabine,

   In workshops I often admit that when techies offer claims of their pet technology as ones of “saving time” that it is a code word for “I am Lying” but RSS is the one exception- it truly saves time with managing information coming from more sources than you could browse or visit.

   The way to deal with withdrawal is to shrug your shoulders and move on. If you are sufficiently connected with others through social network or follow other people who’s RSS feeds are good filters, you learn that if something you missed is important, others will echo it.

   There is no need to read them all nor is there a reason to do it all the time. My favorite is Google Reader- stuff you haven;t read is still down the scroll, keyboard shortcuts make scanning a breeze. When I started reading RSS 4 or 5 years ago, I would read feeds from one author at a time; now with GReader, I create folders (tags) with items like “education technology” “virtual worlds” “gadgets” “weird stuff”, and each thus has a mixture of content from different sources. You can also search all your feed content by keyword. There is newly added language translation

   There are single key commands to “share” a story that you can syndicate automatically to a blog page. A very useful addon is the Google Reader Preview greasemonkey script for Firefox which allows you to see a full entry within GReader, so you don’t have to open a new tab or window to read a full story or leave a comment to a blog
   http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9455

   I scan a few times per day, but its my job to track and report a lot of trends. If I had to dump anything from my time plate, it would be twitter, facebook, et al, but never RSS. It is the killer app.
   ———————————————————–
   Alan Levine ✪
   Vice President, NMC Community and CTO
   ————————————————————
   NMC: The New Media Consortium: sparking innovative learning and creativity
   6101 W. Courtyard, Bldg. One Suite 100, Austin, TX 78730
   t: (512) 445-4200 f:(512) 445-4205 aim/skype: cogdogblog
   http://www.nmc.org
   NMC Campus Observer: Second Life http://sl.nmc.org/
   NMC Virtual Worlds: virtualworlds.nmc.org
   For details see http://www.nmc.org/cal
   **********

   So in short, choose your source of info with more thoughts than is required to push a button. Then you can avoid getting spammed by your own doing.

Leave a Reply

Name __('(required)')

Mail (will not be published) __('(required)')

Website

Anti-spam word: (Required)*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture.