RSS Feed - Killer App?
This summer I enrolled in a class titled Current Topics in Reading Education: Teaching 21st Century Literacy Skills at Rutgers GSE. I am thrilled about this course offering; in fact, I would go as far to say that I've anticipated such classes for the past three years. Education is slowly dragging its feet into across the threshold (or what Bill Clinton labeled the "Bridge") to the 21st century. Here we are, sorry we're late!
Today we started to learn about RSS feeds. For the past year or so, I was vaguely aware of XML such as RSS and Atom. Required reading for this course - Will Richardson's book, "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classroms".
Chapter 5 is labeled "RSS: The new Killer App for Educators". A rather bold statement! Richardson does an excellent job of defining an RSS, giving relevant examples, a detailed how-to, and offers suggestions for classroom usage. This chapter, as well as the entire book, is written from the perspective of an educator which is mirrored in his writing voice. The information is comprehensible for a wide audience, yet he doesn’t pull punches with tech talk.
For all that it is worth; I don’t know if I necessarily agree with his belief of RSS as a killer app for educators. Interestingly enough, many of his examples came from the world of news media. Most of his discussion relating to education was merely conjecture of what could be possible. At most, he offered an example how he utilizes RSS as a way to quickly read through his student’s blogs.
I can buy the idea of useful, but in my opinion, “killer app” is a bit of an overstatement. Then again, I haven’t initiated a student blogging project. I can settle on the idea that the idea of XML such as RSS and Atom remains to be realized.
Today I attempted to subscribe to my blog's feed though Bloglines, and came up empty handed - all items were well over a year old. You can check out the direct Atom.xml without an xml reader or aggregator at http://www.wordsareworlds.net/atom.xml. I reset the XML options through Blogger's dashboard, and my fingers are crossed that this post will arrive via a Blogline subscription to my own blog. So far - nothing.
Stupid Blogger doesn't allow the RSS brand of XML, and everything has to be accomplished through their version of Atom. Even worse, they pass users along to a site named FeedBurner (which passed me along to Bloglines). My faith in Google based products is somewhat shaken, especially since I can subscribe to an RSS of Google's own blog. Maybe this is something I just need to tinker with.
Today we started to learn about RSS feeds. For the past year or so, I was vaguely aware of XML such as RSS and Atom. Required reading for this course - Will Richardson's book, "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classroms".
Chapter 5 is labeled "RSS: The new Killer App for Educators". A rather bold statement! Richardson does an excellent job of defining an RSS, giving relevant examples, a detailed how-to, and offers suggestions for classroom usage. This chapter, as well as the entire book, is written from the perspective of an educator which is mirrored in his writing voice. The information is comprehensible for a wide audience, yet he doesn’t pull punches with tech talk.
For all that it is worth; I don’t know if I necessarily agree with his belief of RSS as a killer app for educators. Interestingly enough, many of his examples came from the world of news media. Most of his discussion relating to education was merely conjecture of what could be possible. At most, he offered an example how he utilizes RSS as a way to quickly read through his student’s blogs.
I can buy the idea of useful, but in my opinion, “killer app” is a bit of an overstatement. Then again, I haven’t initiated a student blogging project. I can settle on the idea that the idea of XML such as RSS and Atom remains to be realized.
Today I attempted to subscribe to my blog's feed though Bloglines, and came up empty handed - all items were well over a year old. You can check out the direct Atom.xml without an xml reader or aggregator at http://www.wordsareworlds.net/atom.xml. I reset the XML options through Blogger's dashboard, and my fingers are crossed that this post will arrive via a Blogline subscription to my own blog. So far - nothing.
Stupid Blogger doesn't allow the RSS brand of XML, and everything has to be accomplished through their version of Atom. Even worse, they pass users along to a site named FeedBurner (which passed me along to Bloglines). My faith in Google based products is somewhat shaken, especially since I can subscribe to an RSS of Google's own blog. Maybe this is something I just need to tinker with.
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