I have done a fair bit of trogging around the internet tonight – troggin’ and bloggin’ 🙂 looking for ways to use RSS feeds – specifically in education, but anywhere really.
So what has my trogging found? Not alot that isn’t already pretty obvious. The best way to use RSS feeds is the one that I set up the other night: set up Google Reader (other readers are available) with blogs, wikis, news sites etc that are of interest to you. This is a good way of sharing resources, particularly if you are in a blogging community such as ours. The way that we are using our blogs and RSS feeds is creating our very own online community of practice but that is very much a conscious effort on our part. If we were studying a different course that didn’t include e-learning, would we still be as interested in our little community? If we weren’t being assessed on our blogs would we be as active as we are? I don’t believe that blogging would create a CoP on its own in many other settings TBH.
So what other uses of RSS feeds have I found?
My favourite one is from one of the RSS websites:
10. Study Guides
Many websites that are focussed on studying. Have created RSS feeds that contain daily questions. There are feeds for “word of the day” or “problem of the day”. Students can subscribe to the feed and integrate long term studying into their daily routines.(http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-and-education.htm)
That could be a really useful tool – set the students a small task each day/week. But that could be done via all kinds of other tools; Twitter, VLE, email and so on.
Another idea is to convert an RSS feed into an audio feed. I found this in a SlideShare Powerpoint:
jubarutumbleweeder 
Hi Julie,
What a fab post! 🙂 Thanks. I envy your very practical way of looking at things and it keeps my on my toes. I really like what you’ve found out about ‘Word of the Day’ and audio feedback. These could be extremely useful and dynamic for language learning, especially if my students choose the sites and ‘let me in on it’, so to speak. I could then design all sorts of (exam) type tasks based on their choices of websites, etc … Of course that would be extra work for a teacher, but I’d hope it might increase engagement. And perhaps this could be in line with Lucy’s idea of students designing tests/tasks for their peers (see http://lpdrum.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/biggs-up/#comment-19)
I suddenly get the feeling / thought that I’m not really engaging with how to use RSS myself, and relying and loafing on other people’s comments. OK, that’s my task for this morning. 🙂
Jubaru… – I’m a bit with you on RSS feeds here. This is the first time I have ever used RSS feeds. I was really impressed with the ease of getting them set up on googlereader (initially for this course) and today for the first time I have subscribed to some for work purposes so that I can get up to date funding information for arts as I have a lecture to deliver coming up soon. I can’t really see how I can really use RSS feeds for more than keeping myself up to date in the fast changing world of funding and policy work.
Craig – I am really impressed and intrigued by your ideas for setting up exam pieces relating to the audio and word of the day. How could you make that work? Sounds fab!
Wow, look at that little chain: Lucy – Craig – Julie – Tina – Julie + Craig. Cool!
Nice you’re impressed, Tina, though it’d be more impressive if I could find the time to do it. I imagine converting a feed chosen by a student to a podcast, then designing any number of tasks model in the type of tasks that they’ll come across in their external exam. As for the ‘Word of The Day’ feeds, if students were to give me words they’d collected over a period of time, I could easily design vocab tasks with these, providing students gave me a good enough reason of how they might be used in several contexts – does this relate to Feuerstein’s view of metacogntion and inductive learning?
Tina – have you learned any new things or found new sources of information since using RSS? I have yet to discover the ‘world of the feeder’ 🙂
After writing my previous reply, it got me thinking about Yacci’s comments on Response Lag. I know there wasn’t a direct message loop between Tina and myself, but for Tina her response to my comments here were immediate, whilst I had to look back and see what I’d written and figure out why I’d written it because, as Yacci notes “[o]ften, original message intent is forgotten” (p.11). I know this isn’t a teacher-student situation (though Tina did teach us once 😉 ) but it’s good to note how we all exist side by side in this space, even if in different periods of time.
Would we bother if we weren’t being assessed? I would like to think that we would bother, but am not convinced of my own intentions. After saying that, are we also learning to communicate and share in this virtual space? As someone who’d like to go into e-moderating and facilitating, I do find it interesting. What does anyone else think about this? I guess the crux is if we continue here after we’ve done the assignment? Perhaps we could try using it for the second assignment. It certainly seems to work better than the NIng site.
Thanks Craig. But does this work better than the Ning BECAUSE it is assessed? Would we possilby have put more into the Ning if that too was assessed? Or is it just that there is more of a focus on these blogs – we are more aware of what is expected of us? I too would like to think that the assessment doesn’t matter but I can’t honestly say that I would still be blogging as often as I am now, if it wasn’t assessed.
Going back to the exercise during the day school – what can WE say about our use of blogs? Can we come to any consensus here?
Hi juba, I think if you upload a photo, the splodge should go and you’ll appear for all in blogland to see. 🙂
Well, I just wrote quite a long comments and then lost the blasted thing 😦 !
I guess you’re right about the assessment aspect, Julie, but don’t forget we’re not being assessed on what we say or ‘do’ here, but on our reflections or our experiences and how we relate them to theory. I guess if it this blog VCoP wasn’t part of a course module, than mutual communication would be more protracted as we consider the exhortations of our daily lives.
Thanks for bringing us back the ‘we’. Perhaps we could say that blogging has enabled us to share both tacit and explicit knowledge from our various professional contexts and make connections that might not otherwise have occurred. Could we see this as an example of how we might share to generate new knowledge across contexts in the future? For me, I would say so. I (;-)) have come to like the blog, but do feel it is very much part of this module. I, perhaps we, feel it is a good way to generate and establish a VCoP, though participation is the key, including rhythm and message coherence (which I’m sometimes guilty of blurring). Does anyone else find it difficult to choreograph the virtual landscape between our individual blogs in order to form links to create new, shared knowledge? Jewson (2007, in Hughes, Jewson and Unwin, 2007) purports that a virtual space is accessible from a multitude of devices each of which “… offers distinctive constraints and opportunities; each requires their users to learn skills appropriate to managing the particular site in which they find themselves at any one moment” (p.161). Therefore, each device, mobile or otherwise, offers different ways to traverse the virtual landscape between our individual entries: individual blogging seems suitable for developing our thoughts and reflections in a public space, but connecting our thoughts to others’ might depend on how and where we access our blogs. I sometimes find this difficult.
However, I appreciate the value of blogging here to learn new things. What do you think?
Ref
Jewson, N. (2007) ‘Communities of Practice in their Place’ in Hughes, J., Jewson, N. and Unwin, L. ‘Communities of Practice: Critical Perspectives’ Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 156-170
BTW – how can I get rid of this horrible green splodge next to my name?
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