Educational Discourse

I’m currently in Dean Shareski’s session on RSS. Dean is going to show us how to use RSS in a digital world. Dean and I have been communicating and sharing via blogging and discussions. We have discussed the use of the read/write web in creating new opportunities for students.

Dean began with a video on the Human Network. He explains the beginning of RSS – Real Simple Syndication – and the time when there were many different RSS readers. Dean does a good job of giving a technical description without being overwhelming.

Dean is giving a presentation on RSS – Real Simple Syndication – that will help people to build a RSS start. Dean begins the session giving a background on RSS. He begins by talking about how he began with RSS and the first uses of RSS with a number of different readers and how, over time, XML beame the standard format.

RSS allows you to subscribe to the different information sources – you pick what you want to see whether it be news or blogs or magazines.

Dean describes about how his RSS feeds are his research sources. He gets his information from the people who post and are on his RSS reader. It helps him to connect to other people. The RSS does not have spam unlike most email clients. In fact, you can narrow it down to a specific section of the information that you want. Blogs and newsites have RSS feeds, icons, that identify the page as one that can be used in a reader.

Dean then showed another video that gave a brief and simple explanation of RSS.
RSS is the next great tool in the spread of information and ultimately freedom: of expression, of communication, of information.

Ways of using RSS – Subscribe to people in your field. Find people who are working in your area and see what is happening and what they are doing. Dean then briefly described using social bookmarking and how it can help. He added some information about Technocrati and how it worked. Dean discussed how RSS can be used for updates flickr accounts, wikis, audio and video. In fact, you can subscribe to many just about anything that has a feed. You can also share your finds with other people using the share button. Another thing to do is to create an aggregated forum that collects RSS feeds for a particular topic or site like student blogs.

Dean moved on to describe how to get a RSS account. He highlighted GoogleReader and bloglines and what they do. From there Dean began an example of how to subsribe to a blog using RSS. He looked up an author and then began the process of subsribing to a blog using two different methods. First, using the subscribe to on the webpage. He then used the Subscribe to button on his browser.

Dean then did a search for a topic and demonstrated how to subscribe to a search in order to get information on a particular topic. H

I’m at the TLt IT Summit2007 in Saskatoon, SK. Ian Jukes is the opening keynote speaker talking about the need to move education from where it is to where it needs to be. Through the keynote, he constantly refers to the need for educators to acknowledge the world of the kids where it is now. Educators were not trained to teach the way that these students are learning. To engage these students there needs to be a revamping of education and the way that teachers interact with students.

He focuses on change and the change process. Much of what he says is repeating what Will, David and others are saying about the need for change in education. It is important for teachers to begin using the tools that are available and know about blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS and other tools from web2.0. The presentation focuses on the need for education to change from the sit-n-git to using and creating. He used Dale’s cone of learning that focuses on how we retain information.

Now, using the triangle and combining it with the tools and technologies, students are able to retain more than through conventional methods. All-in-all the information is not new to those of us that have been discussing this for awhile but to many of the people here, this is new and, for many, really scary. Having said that, I found that Ian was very emphatic on the need for schools and educators to begin using and adopting the technologies.

I’m now off to a new session on creating a division wide tehcnology plan. I’ll update on this. This afternoon, I’m going to be meeting Dean Shareski and going to work with him on RSS. Should be fun!