I was lucky enough to be asked by the National Writing Project to write an article on how I use my RSS feeds and blogging to connect with the world and other teachers, and also to move myself forward in thinking about technology and information flow as a teacher and as a blogger. The article was published this week at the NWP’s revamped Resource site. (See the article entitled” “Bringing the World to my Doorstep“)
How do you use RSS?
I would be curious to know if other folks see RSS as a way to control the wave of information. What I am finding is that I need to continually nurture the RSS (I use Google Reader now but I used to be a fan of Bloglines, until it would not play nice with Edublogs one time too many) and weed it like a garden: I add new sites as they pique my interest and remove old ones that just seem to take up space, and worry about the sites that I don’t even yet know exist but would be important to me.
Peace (in connections),
Kevin
Great article! Congrats. And to answer your question, I use my Google Reader pretty much the same way you do, except I’m not quite so diligent about weeding out old blogs. I really like Google Reader’s Share function. I discover a lot of interesting blogs and posts that way.
Kevin,
I appreciated your article. Helpful and a good read. My RSS Reader’s a wee bit overfull – but it’s still my primary learning tool. I think I share more through it than I write or comment lately – not sure if that’s a good thing.
Terrific article Kevin~ perhaps you’ll remember I stumbled across NetNewsWire earlier in the year and my entire blogging experience changed, as a reader and writer. As soon as I figured out the “subscribe” and “refresh all” buttons, I was hooked. No more scrolling through my bookmark list in Firefox, no more time lost visiting blogs that hadn’t posted for a while… I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one who periodically runs through the list, unsubscribing/deleting, shuffling blog subscriptions about. I subsribe to all sorts of blogs, and look forward to new discoveries or recommendations.
The only thing I still don’t understand…why don’t all bloggers syndicate their entire feed? Getting the first three sentences only…so that I HAVE to go directly to the blog kind of breaks up the rhythm of my reading~ at least it feels like it does! I shouldn’t complain- I really enjoy reading/viewing what others choose to share.
Full piece. Are you satisfied? Thanks to the plug. Too bad the course didn’t run. Great work my friend. 300 blogs a day?
Bonnie