I feel like I’ve been living under a rock. If you take a step back and don’t actively seek out new tech solutions, they are definitely not coming to you (unless they are listed in your aggregator!!!)

I struggle with recommending a good aggregator to people. Bloglines has always been too cumbersome for my taste, and I really like Sage, which integrates into Firefox. However, with Sage, I have not been able to find the time and energy to coordinate my reading list on various computers that I use. I was reading a blog last night which mentioned Google Reader, so I immediately tried it out. I imported my opml file from Firefox very easily and then started playing around with how it works. There are a few constraints that I don’t like, particularly the fact that once a subscription is set up, you have to go into Manage Subscriptions to change the category it is assigned to, which seems a little less intuitive than Google Mail.

The things I love:
-You can easily pull a Subscribe button to the top of your browser in order to easily add subscriptions while reading.
-No importing issues: When I pulled my bookmarks in from Sage, it maintained all the folder categories I had set up.
-You can star important items to come back to later (!), much like Google Mail.
-You can share items that will show up on a unique url.
-Items are easier to read than they were in Sage. Whereas Sage had a two-column format (that I don’t see any place to modify), Google Reader is one column with larger font.

The only thing I miss about Sage— it detects feeds for you. I could suspect there is a feed somewhere, click to subscribe, and I navigate away from the page only to find there is no feed. However, there’s no reason I can’t confirm there is a feed with Sage and then add the subscription to Google Reader.

I wasn’t necessarily looking for definitions when I was browsing through my aggregator, but they found me. A thread on Many 2 Many arrives as a good definition that is useful. Clarification by Matthew Hurst defines tagging as: “the process of associating terms with an item without the constraint of a controlled vocabulary.” If that doesn’t mean anything to you, read the whole post and comments.

now what are the possibilities?

On one of the listserves that comes through my email, someone asked about social bookmarking software that can be installed on your own server. Of course, with del.icio.us, you are stuck with their servers, which is great for two reasons: 1) I do not have to worry about doing something to the server and losing the bookmarks and 2) it allows for a large community of bookmarking. However, this could turn out unfavorably because I then do have to worry about the del.icio.us server being down or getting messed up.

Another listserve member recommended scuttle, which has a site where you can sign up for an account in a similar fashion to del.icio.us (although it took a little while for the confirmation email to come through). Because it is open source, you can also download the installation files, which I have not tried yet.

There are some noticeable difference between the functionality of scuttle and del.cio.us. Scuttle doesn’t list all the tags along the side, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as my list is a little unmanageably and overwhelmingly long and instead offers a bookmark search at the top. It relies on a tag cloud along the side to identify the most popular tags. It limits the number of bookmarks on the page to about ten, as opposed to del.icio.us, where I can choose whether I want to see 10, 25, 50, or 100 at once. These are all cosmetic issues, really, but they do affect usability. Importing del.icio.us bookmarks into scuttle was ridiculously easy. I’m not sure how it works the other way around, but it should be fairly easy given that they are using the same API.
Overall the major disadvantage that I see to scuttle use on the scuttle server is that it does not have the networking functionality that del.icio.us has. I have gotten used to adding people to my “network” on del.icio.us and sending them links there (I wish there were a search feature to find users on del.icio.us!!!).

Of course, with a little research, I can see the scuttle/del.icio.us issue isn’t new and that the others have already thought of ways to cross-use the two services to as to leverage the advantage of the fact that scuttle and del.icio.us are so compatible, including creating code to sync the two and creating code for cross-posting (although both of these posts are a little out of date and thus are work done on earlier versions of scuttle).

This is just an informal post to list some of the issues and questions that came up in the course of our workshops today on RSS feeds, blogs, social bookmarking and podcasting (and every place I use blogs in this post, feel free to replace with dynamic social collaboration tools). I don’t want to lose these thoughts, and I will if I don’t write them down. So in no particular order:

-I was surprised about the initial perceptions about blogging and particularly myspace as largely negative and mostly irrelevant to education. There was mention of the association of myspace with crime (I’m guessing the resonating effects of the Taylor Behl case).

-The question was raised—why is it that a child who would freak out if their mom invaded the privacy of their room is willing to post all kinds of private information (name, address, school, etc) in an online forum such as myspace?

-It was expressed that blogging content is not reliable information (fair enough) and thus information from blog sources may not be appropriate for the classroom. This is an interesting one. I’m going to take this a little farther with a RL (real life) analogy. If we were all sitting at the corner store, having a glass of soda on the porch and having a conversation, how would we know whose information to trust? The “blogosphere” is not really all that different—the information is as credible as the source, and all netizens must develop the skills to be adept at evaluating the source. Looking at who is authoring a site, who connects to or comments on their site, what sources they refer to—this is how we can start to construct a perspective of what is “true” using a variety of information sources.

-The above leads into the larger point—we cannot just think of blogs purely as CONTENT. They are dynamic. The information is updated with regularity. The style is colloquial. It is PROCESS, not PRODUCT driven. The perspective of the writer is hopefully changing, growing, developing over time. The affordances built into a blogging platform allow for discourse and quick linking to original sources and other commentary. The interactions with others through the medium; the links to the words of others; belonging to a community of discussion–this is the larger picture of the potential of these RSS-fueled media.

-Internet 2 ≠ Web 2.0

- A lot of concerns about privacy, and what is appropriate and not appropriate for students to discuss openly. When confidentiality, privacy, building insular trust in a class is critical, blogging/podcasting/etc is not appropriate. Are controversial topics appropriate? Where do free speech lines get crossed?
-For educators preparing professionals in the community (nurses, teachers, etc.), even if blogging is not integral to the course, discussion of one’s representation of self online could be key, as inappropriate content online can derail a career.

-Can .swf files embedded in RSS feed be automatically detected and downloaded to a podcatcher (Juice)? Are there any restrictions on the type of embedded media that can be dowloaded via a podcatcher?

-My own question—is blogging behind password protection still blogging? Or is it something else? This is only an issue at this point because Blackboard is so backwards in terms of not providing any kind of blogging space that would be worth using, and because they do not provide a way to link RSS feeds from discussion boards. (In other words, our choices at my institution are a basic discussion board or a wide-open-to-the-world blog.) When those features are added, I hypothesize that the majority of educators interested in blogging will step back behind their content management system for student discourse. And that’s ok. But we still need to understand what is going on with all that information is out there in the blogosphere.

-The progression the use of these tools need to take is for students to become adept at finding useful information to their process of lifelong learning, to create their own content, to participate in educational communities that sustain the curiosity that convinced students to enroll in a course in the first place.

Some things we did not talk about nearly enough:

-Use of these tools for communication is fundamentally changing how we interact with others. There is no way around this, once you start digging in. In addition, once you start to “lurk” and comment on blogs, these changes begin.

-I do not like to the buy into the myth of the “millenial” students, who are basically cyborgs at this point. That is way too simplistic. These students–perhaps more than older students who understand what we are giving up and sacrificing in the way of privacy, and who have certain conceptions of what constitutes a “trusted source”–NEED space and guidance in reflecting on the nature of information and communication in the age of ICT.

-The truly positive side to these social communication and collaboration tools in terms of connecting isolated individuals with various needs (whether it be educational, community support in dealing with an illness or life difficulty, friendship) and providing a space, not connected with geography, to form human ties.

-If one believes that most of what is on blogs is useless drivel and too much information, what sources of information do you trust and why? We give a lot of credence to information that is “published” because it has been peer-reviewed. In a heavily read blogging site with many readers, isn’t that also “peer-reviewed” to some extent? Are experts always acting in the interest of simply deploying truth, or are there other factors at play?

All in all great audience participation and questions.