A Constructive Eye-Opening Experience

I just finished reading this week's lecture, an it reminded me of something I would like to share with you. After graduating from college and finally getting my Bachelor's in Computer Science, I started to work at the Center for Distance Learning at The University of Texas Pan American as a Multimedia Specialist. Since my job was researching and testing new media technologies that could be beneficial if implemented in the curriculum, I enrolled in an online course (my first online learning experience) from the Walden Institute (now called Walden University) to learn more about online learning and teaching. The course was called "Certified Online Instructor".

At first I was surprised and a bit disappointed about, what I thought then, the little interaction I had with the course instructor. All I had was some documents posted on the course web portal, along with some activities and/or reading assignments. As the course progressed, I followed along and did the required reading and assignments. Yet, I was still waiting for the instructor to play his traditional role as the "Director" or "Expert". As the course continued to move along, I realized that the activities, and the course overall, were driving me to interact with my peers and dig out information that was becoming substantive and relevant to me as I discovered it.

After successfully completing the course, I realized a couple of things. First, I learned a lot about teaching online, and I did not gain all the knowledge from the course instructor as I originally expected. Instead, I gained knowledge from the course content, the interaction with other class peers an the guidance and facilitation of the instructor.

How RSS Changed the Way I Surf the Web

For some of the courses in the ETL program, as part of the orientation assignment for the first week, we are asked to provide three websites that would somehow define our professional life/career and personal interests. I started to type a brief bio of myself without thinking much about the assignment. However, when it was time to provide the addresses of websites related to my profession and/or personal interests, I could not think of a specific website, There are so many of them... I thought. I then realized that I no longer visit all the different websites, nor do I remember all of their addresses or names.

The RSS aggregator I've been using, has allowed me to have access to all these different websites that may have any content of interest without having to visit each one of these website. Without knowing it, I had taken advantage of the greatest benefit that RSS and blogs have provided to individuals using the web.

I've become somehow addicted to RSS, and I did not know about until now! This has changed the way I access information on the web, or rather, RSS allow the important information come to me.

RSS and Choosing a Framework

Thanks for all the RSS resources in this week’s lecture! Especially helpful and useful was the RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators that Dr. Milman linked. This will also be useful for faculty members at my college that are struggling to understand RSS.

Erik provided some wonderful and useful ideas in his post and I am interested in exploring his ideas further since I’m looking for an elegant way to add news headlines to our college web site.

In playing around with this idea, a few months ago I managed to add headlines from my blog into my portfolio web site on this page; scroll down and look in lower right column. I used a service called Feedburner to do this. The feedburner service offers some other neat things, too. For example, I added the ability for a blog visitor to subscribe for email notification of new blog content. You can view it here in the right column under the category cloud. This is worthwhile for folks that don’t use an RSS reader and prefer to be notified by email of any new stuff. They are out there; believe me! Never mind that email is so 1996 and all. ;-)

For those that require an RSS feed for any given popular reader/application, feedburner also offers those little badges or chicklets, as they call them, for you to include on your site or blog. You probably saw them earlier on this link, right under the subscription link. You’ll notice bloglines, google, yahoo and a few others there. This is a nice offering for your visitors that may use one of those services – gives them an instant way to add your site to their RSS reader.

Feedburner offers a few other widgets for your blog that you might find useful. Here’s a screen shot of where you choose your widget and it generates the script for you. Then, just copy and paste into your web site.

This page explains a little more about the widgets available. Scroll down the page to see the table of explanations. Also note that these same widgets work for podcasts, as well.

With regard to one of this week’s activities, the examination of instructional modules and frameworks, I found this activity useful. Of particular interest was the section of “other sites” listed in that activity. I believe they appealed to me because my proposed IMU, at this point, doesn’t look like it will fit into any of the other frameworks listed. So these other sites seemed more instructional with Q & A, which is where I am at this point in the design process. I really liked the Ojalá que llueva café site; I thought that was clever and well-done. If we had had the internet and online instructional modules back when *I was in high-school (197X-198X), I can see being engaged in the activities presented here. Overall, I thought all the sites in the activity presented a wide-variety of frameworks that could be utilized in the design of an IMU. However, I can already see that the needs analysis will be very beneficial in helping me decide and narrow down my options with regard to framework!

*This qualifies as personal info! But here are a few photos of my cats, if you're into viewing cute furry animals. :)

Blogs and Wikis are great, but RSS is where the real power is

Just to bring you all up to speed with where I am with the things we read about this week, and because it is is relevant to the conversation, and can be the fun factoid about myself, I'd like to describe my love affair with RSS. I have been blogging for several years now (actually, my time in ETL has brought my blog contributions to a halt, but that is another story), and have been presenting blogging as a concept to all sorts of departments at the university I work for as well.

In this, I have come to think of blog as sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy for web publishing. As the lesson hinted at... in the beginning there was the web, and it was good, but it certainly wasn't easy. The simplistic nature of a chronologically managed written content is all most people want. Blogs are nothing special in of themselves, but blogging as a movement or trend in homegrown authorship is quite powerful (as mainstream media seems to remind us ceaselessly).

And in this unbridled potential power... the first innovation to really make the web about more than those people with the resources to put things out there, is just one thing out there that can take advantage of the power of RSS. If blogging is a vast collective phenomenon comprised of individual component blogs, then RSS is the glue that holds everything together... and the surface is merely being scratched.

While blogs are the new kids on the block, I see more and more web services that offer some kind of RSS or XML syndication component. And while this may not seems like such a big deal, it is. It means that all those services that use one of these standards has reduced its offerings down to basic building blocks that can be reinterpreted as one sees fit. An individual blog post is the same as an individual news story is the same as an individual search result is the same as an individual forum posting is the same as an individual ebay item is the same as an individual upcoming event on a calendar. The fact that I can choose to look at all these things at once is amazing.

One real life application that I have done in the past would be to take multiple feeds and show them off on single web page. For example, we could edit the design of this blog to show the latest posts made by other teams. One service that makes this easy for people who don't want to get their hands covered in code is to use Feed2JS. I have had much success with this service which has its roots in education. It lets you paste in a feed URL and returns a piece of java script you can paste into a web page to have it show the latest items from the feed. \
I am sorry if I am all over the place with this post, but the subject matter has been so close at hand for so long. As a result, I am really excited to hear what others have to say about this week's content,.