Link: LearningTimes Network.
I just finished listening to and watching a taped session about how RSS can help learners and educators. How the session itself was done was quite remarkable. It's a virtual classroom done through javascript that allows a full interaction of learners and presenters. I loved that I was learning beside people from literally all over the world...snycronously....and asyncronously. Go ahead and try it. Click on the above. You might have to register but it's free an worth it.
But anyway, back to my musing about what I learned. The presenter, Mary Harrsch, showed how she used Blogger for 7 different blogs. I was glad to see other educators using this weblog resource, as that is one that I am currently experimenting with myself. What I thought was interesting is how she uses a different blog for each of her various interests. By splitting them up into seperate blogs, her readers can have a focused gaze into which ever area intersts them in particular. This as opposed to reading through posts that, from a well educated woman like her, and quite unique and varied.
I was also impressed with the great idea of a web "zine" that was a common place to see her feeds in one place. Here is Mary's called Roman Times. I can see a teacher using this to pull together a classroom publication. Or for the teacher to be able to see all of the students work on one page as opposed to having to see them individually as feeds. I can see a great appeal for a "one stop shop", if you will. And then, of course, she had inbedded RSS feeds to the individual blogs list within the e-Zine. Currenly I am teacnhing biology and can see this easily incorparated into this discipline. I do need to find the html template for setting up a "Zine" like this. And what about server space too to host the site? Hummm, this is what I need to look into more to make this a reality.
Also one of the cool eye openners was how she used the API from Flickr to create a webpage of streams for particular tags. See hers here for the roman empire and ruins. Once again I would need to find an html template so that I could plug in my own terms. Then that same problem of getting it hosted somewhere.
But I like how this is all dynamic and ever changing. Change always gets my students to come back for more and varied information. In essence, the site is just a aggreagation of all of her blogs and of pictures that have to do with the same topic. (pictures tagged as such by other flickr users). Now off to see how I can make this happen in my own world.
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