One of the metaphors I find myself moving more and more to of late is “Aggregator as Textbook.†Google Reader is the place (along with Twitter of late) that I head to first every day when I open up my computer, and on an average day, I end up going back there at least 4 or 5 times. It’s become an important part of my learning process, because my daily study almost always starts and flows from what’s collected there.
That being the case, I’ve been thinking more and more about my own use of RSS, and trying to reflect on the choices I make in my aggregator. Frankly, I am still amazed that so relatively few people (not just educators) have made RSS a part of their practice, but I wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with how disruptive a technology it is when you really think about it. It changes the traditional information structures in fundamental ways, and it forces us to be much more involved with the information we consume. I’m no longer just a reader; I’m an editor who is constantly at work in the process of finding feeds to read, determining what’s relevant, trying to connect ideas and patterns, making decisions as to what to do with all of the information I come across.
The technical side to RSS is not that difficult. But I constantly wonder if I’m “doing RSS well†in the way I use it. So, anyway, here are six things I wonder about my own use of what I think is the most powerful of all of these technologies.
What’s my optimum number of feeds to read? I’ve gone between 25 and 250, and now at about 60 I’m still not sure if that’s the “right†number. And it’s not just a time factor that determines that number, although that has more to do with it than anything else. The scope of topics and a diversity of views also has a lot to do with it.
How do I not become “married†to the feeds I already have? It would be easy to keep the 60 or so feeds that I have for a long time, but I’m not sure that’s the best strategy. As new voices appear, as my interests shift, I need to be willing to let some old voices go. That’s exceedingly hard, at times, because I don’t want to miss anything, and because I feel connected to those teachers on many levels.
Do I rely too much on a handful of feeds? I’ll admit, while I struggle reading every feed every day, there are a half dozen or so that I try not to miss. I think of these as the ones that do the best job of culling out the important ideas of the day. In many cases, these people are reading many of the same sources I am. I wonder if this makes it even more difficult to read more widely.
How many individual pieces of information can I realistically make sense of? There are days when I could easily find 50 or so interesting, relevant posts or links to sites, and I wonder if that’s always such a good thing. If I were to try to process all of that, will the best filter up?
How do I best organize the information that is most useful? I have a del.icio.us account, and I stow away some snippets of things in various spots. I tag and tag and tag. But this is my most difficult struggle. I’ve yet to find a really effective way of processing all the ideas and links that make it easy to return to later.
Should I read ideas, or should I read people? Stephen Downes advocates for the former, and I can understand why. It’s the concept, the exchange of ideas that is important, not the person so much. Still, I find it very difficult to separate the two, and I do think that knowing the person through the writing adds context to the ideas. But, again, reading people also tends to limit the scope and diversity of the ideas, I think.
Without question, my aggregated text requires much more intellectual sweat than the traditional form. And that’s actually why I want my own kids to become adept at writing their own texts around the topics they find engaging. I’ve put together Pageflakes pages for my kids built on RSS feeds about horses and the Phillies as a way to get them started. But that’s just the first step.
So, I wonder, what do you wonder about RSS?
Okay, Okay…I give. Not that I’ve totally changed my view about how many feeds but I do think I’m going to focus on a few voices…as long as those voices/people are diligent in their efforts to expose new ideas and voices.
For example, I have a few feeds which rarely if ever link to others. This is a flag for me that they will only take me so far. I need others to point me further. Unlike a textbook, blog postings are the start of ideas and change but rarely are all encompassing.
So as I weed my feeds down to a more manageable number, I want to insure they will be people that not only push ideas as well as enhance existing beliefs, they ought to lead me to new things on a regular basis.
From there, I’ll perhaps add others and then determine after a given time frame if they are pushing or enhancing my learning.
I also like the idea of examples for student RSS. I remember a couple of years ago, I tried this but had little success since much of children’s material had very few available feeds. Thanks for revitalize this idea.
I agree with you in terms of letting old feeds go. Their content/vision could have shifted, your interests might have shifted, but the periodic re-evaluation of your feeds is not a bad thing, even if it doesn’t lead to any culling – it’s an exercise in critical thought – “how do I feel about these issues, and is it worth my time to continue to follow the discussion here?” Consider it spring cleaning.
As a newbie blogger, I’m also engaging in that editorial element of feed reading you mention, but as a teacher, I’m trying to connect the information back to the classroom. I’ve not yet found feeds that I find valuable enough to ask students to subscribe to wholesale (as opposed to articles here and there, which I have incorporated into lessons), but the beauty of Google Reader is the ability to pick and choose and create your own Shared Feed – or, your own textbook, as you put it, with minimal time/effort other than reading the article and considering classroom implications, which you’d do anyway. All your kids have to do is sign up for some kind of Feedburner/Google Reader/Netvibes/etc. account and have at it.
I dipped my toe in the water this past year when I first had kids create a wiki, and since then I’ve jumped headlong into the deep end, between Slideshare, Slidecast, podcasts, Twitter, Shared Feeds, etc. It’s going to be an exciting teaching year ahead.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Aggregators as textbooks! This summarizes this several weeks for me perfectly. After reading your book about seven weeks ago, I immediately set up RSS feeds and started subscribing to blogs–the best of the best, I think. I was immersed in what Vicki Davis calls a Circle of Wisdom. I used them as the basis for an independent study to finish off my MLIS degree. It started as just an easy tech skills update, ended up profoundly changing how I think about learning and teaching. An experience I want to recreate for my own students and the teachers at my school.
So, Will, I think you’ve definitely hit on something there. In the recent workshop I gave (grin–where I heavily touted your book I might add), I quoted you and implored them “If you don’t do ANYTHING else, set up an RSS feed and start reading!”
This is something I’ve been thinking about as I manage a new project in Scotland for aggregating information for newbies. Most people, as you say, want the main issue for the day/week/month, but also want something rich now and then, which brings in links from loads of different sources.
There’s a blog post coming on this from me, about the hows of my feed reading, but currently run on about 860 feeds covering education, technology, futurism, marketing, business, and news. They are categorised in order of priority for me (starting with ‘metafeeds’, feeds of feeds which cover mentions of me, my work, my organisation, the companies I’m working with at any moment, then onto educators in Scotland, UK, Europe, US, Canada, Australia, NZ, Asia [not in any order]) and finishing with media, marketing and social media specialists. That gives me a chance to pick and choose if I am short of time and mark the rest as unread. If it’s a really big story I’ll pick it up on another day. I never mark any education ones as read. I’ll always skim and scan.
The richness comes from speed-reading – 40 mins in the morning and 40 mins at night – and then a couple of times a week pulling together the big pictures, deliciousing a few (I try to do this as I go along) and binning others.
The result? A richer, I think, outlook on what is going on in the world regarding this technology and where it fits in. Richer than I would have had without it, that is, since I don’t know other bloggers who cover things in the way I want to cover it.
That’s why my blog, ultimately, is a personal tool, to keep my vision on the straight and narrow as the technology changes apace around me.
Damian–
Rather than finding feeds for students, why not teach them to find their own. I’m planning to set up a “transformational blogging” assignment this year, where students become experts on a subject over the course of the semester (I borrowed the idea from Will’s book). They have to define their topic, find relevant information/blogs, write in their own blogs and eventually develop/complete a final project.
Oh – and it helps to read and type very quickly 😉 The new project to bring this altogether should be launched Sept 7th.
Another classic Will post, to be sure.
1. “Aggregator as Textbook” is language we can all use to shift our thinking/assumptions.
2. That you asked more questions than provided answers says much about you as a learner, and leader. Well done.
3. Best of all? That you’re setting up PageFlakes for your own kiddos’ learning at home and in life. Much for all of us to learn here, my friend. If Beckett wasn’t just 11 months old, we’d be PageFlaking around the clock here at home! One day…and look forward to following your lead when he’s ready.
RE: the culling-of-feeds, I’ve actually decided to stop reading — 100% — ALL RSS FEEDS for nearly 2 months…and will be starting over from scratch this fall when I start teaching again. To be honest, Twitter has become my new ‘feed’ (of sorts), so I’m keeping up with bloggers that inform my thinking this summer, but I’ve dumped the daily or minute-by-minute RSS feed syndrome that had really become a dominate part of my life the last 2 years. When I return to the classroom, I will no longer keep a ‘blog roll’ in the side bar of my blog, although I will keep a wiki that acts in the same way (and will sit as a link on my blog sidebar)…which I’ll constantly update (weekly? monthly?) and add commentary as to ‘why’ the blogger/blog catches my attention and challenges my thinking. The ‘list’ format is ‘dead’ for me; only with context does it have value as I go forward. And this means I’ll be letting go of some favorite bloggers from the past few years (no longer interested in the “Where I’m speaking next” or “Look at what airport I’m blogging from on the way to yet another keynote speech” entries)…and will be looking to those who can confidently weave together technical and conceptual elements while telling good stories to populate my “I’m reading these blogs now” section of the wiki.
Why? Because it is about my own learning this time around…not just the populating of sidebars theory of group-hugging. If anyone comes by to the wiki and finds value, wonderful…and if not, no worries, because I’ll still be going there for my own learning/exploration.
Finally, the reason that most bloggers (and educators) still do not RSS is a matter of ‘technical’ mis-understanding. Until it is as intuitive as the sunshine, until it stops requiring someone to set up an account and judge between various RSS reader philosophies/tools, it will still ONLY be a subset of a few in-the-know ‘techies’ who do it naturally. Google Reader comes as close as any, and in my opinion is the ONLY guarantee we can consider in terms of mass use of RSS in the near-term. And until all blogging platforms make it as simple as making ice cubes to imbed RSS into all blogs and posts, it’s a waste of time to criticize new bloggers (and many experienced ones, too) for not making their blogging world (as writer or reader) RSS-centric. Wish it were otherwise, but not so.
Again, great phrase, Will. You continue to be near top of my wiki links with work like this (not that you need another reader, follower, or fan to confirm your value in the larger conversation).
Cheers to you and your kiddos in PageFlakes (and shark at the beach) land.
Christian
@Jeri – Thanks for the idea – I will definitely look into it in more detail.
Students often don’t use RSS, not because they find it’s disruptive, but because they don’t know how useful it can be until they start doing it (the best way to do this is to point them to Netvibes and show them the facebook module!)I’ve never seen a student make a serious start of RSS and then stop using it later.
On the main point of “Aggregator as Textbook”, there are just too few true “academic” feeds available for students (especially in higher education). However, you could use del.icio.us to create a reading list for students by letting them feed in a certain tag and tagging articles that you think they should read… thus making a very nice textbook that you control completely.
I love the idea, but have to agree with Andre here. There is a real paucity of good “academic” material. I am working on a Ph.D. at the moment (while teaching full time, of course) and was excited about the tremendous possibility of RSS as a research tool that would help me with me own studies. The long and short of it, however, is that most investigators in higher education are focused more on refereed publications than they are on getting there thoughts out there for immediate consumption on a blog. Maybe it’s just my field (Hispanic Literature), but it seems that the professors are a bit behind the eight ball.
Ewan: You are not human. Which is why you are a great person to have in my aggregator. ;0) There is no way that mortals like me process that much information in the chunks you are talking about. So, you’re officially an outlier. ;0)
Jason and Andre: Not to sound anti-intellectual (which I have been accused of before) but you’re not suggesting that the feeds coming into my aggregator don’t represent academic discourse and resources, are you? I think the definition of academic is in flux, at least I know it’s changed in my experience, from something that has traditional credentialing to something that has relevance and accuracy, pushes my thinking, and comes from a trusted source in or out of my network (though usually within.) But you are right to suggest that the definition isn’t changing much in higher ed.
I’m new to rss (4 weeks in) and I admit that I still don’t have a real handle on it. Teaching fulltime and being the principal at our school limits the amount of time I can really use to deeply cull from all the data my feeds collect.
I do tag to del.icio.us anything I find interesting, but now I need to spend about 1 week cleaning up my tags so they are use full. Someone I find it comforting that my boys (ages 7 and 5) will one day do all this naturally.
I must admit that blogs that tell more than inform (ie at O’hara airport in starbucks reading my presentation wiki v. giving me something to work with) are slowly becoming a pet peeve.
What about the trends feature at reader.google? Does anyone use it to eliminate feeds?
Like bcarrera, I also wonder how to integrate the RSS habit into daily practice. I’d like to hear from full-time teachers who are successfuly managing RSS as part of their daily classroom routine/professional development. Who are they? How do they do it?
I was a full-time teacher until taking a leave in 2005 to have a baby and resume work on a master’s degree in IT. I first set up my aggregator this past spring as part of a class assignment. I loooove it. Like Jeri already said, my daily feeds combined with my own efforts at writing a blog are by far the most meaningful professional development activities I’ve ever known in 12 years of teaching.
But I can barely manage 30+ feeds. When I consider how I’ll maintain the RSS habit in addition to juggling the daily responsibilities of classroom teaching, my head feels like it will explode!
I am reminded of the stacks of neglected NCTE English Journals I guiltily thumbed through each summer. . . .
I just thought of an issue that schools might have with this idea, and was wondering what we could do about it. In my district textbook adoption is a tedious and long process. So if RSS is going to be my textbook, and it is going to be changing faster than even I can keep up, how is the district going to approve it? Lemme know what you think.
For me, the RSS feeds are more important than email and most days the aggregator is opened and skimmed before any messages get answered.
As to how many feeds to keep, I’ve found it’s too easy to become “married” to just a few feeds, which I think eventually limits your reach. I have a core of people I read first, but then I try to follow one or two unfamiliar links recommended by those folks every day.
That’s probably why I’m up to 160 feeds in my aggregator, many more than the links in my blogroll (the core). I will admit that I don’t necessarily read every post every day. As Ewan said, it helps to be a speed reader – or at least be able to quickly scan for interesting or intriguing titles.
How many individual pieces of information can I realistically make sense of?
This is what I’ve been battling with. I admit, I resisted RSS for a long time, but now it’s the only way I can try to ‘keep up,’ (if you really can call it that!)
It has made me much more productive and by using RSS I don’t miss or forget to check my favorites. It also helps me skim the topics and only read what appeals to me at the moment. Many folks are talking about very similar topics at the same time – so I can choose one blog to be my ‘goto’ for that topic and skip the rest.
I do feel like an outsider though… a bit like a Grue in the pitch black lurking a bit. I guess that just means I have to comment a bit more!
This post has piqued my interest. I have been worrying over my obsession with reading blogs. I have to clear the RSS feeds in the morning and at night. I’m currently sitting on 110 feeds and find it hard to let any go. I do skim read, but truly, if you take a step back and think about it, I am not getting or giving any quality like that. I want to engage in conversation, I want to wrestle with ideas, I want to be challenged and provide challenge.
Infowhelm is a big part of 21st Century learning, we need to model how to cope with this and teach our students how to do the same.
Problem is, I haven’t figured out the answer yet 🙂
Firstly, for those new to aggregators and feeds – welcome aboard! you are still ahead of 99% of online users. Stand by tho, it’s about to go through the roof. I won’t bore you with statistics but the numbers are staggering and reasonably so to. Is there a better medium for content delivery? I doubt it – maybe a courier! Talk about 100% delivery, spam-free and gives the subscriber complete control over the delivery. Still, there are so many uses for RSS that we haven’t even thought of yet. Now is the time – the Bullrush is coming….
I’m offering a free trial this week for our new online feed creation service if you’d like to start creating feeds using an easy wizard write to me on here and i’ll get you started.
Regards, Richard Herbert
http://www.rssresponse.com
Sorry, Will, this is quite banal by comparison with the above!
You’ve been tagged :
First, the Rules:
1) Post these rules before you give your facts.
2) List 8 random facts about yourself.
3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them.
4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged.
Will- I have presented to teachers and administrators about the power of using RSS feeds. I always love to show them my aggregator with its 170+ feeds. A question I’m always asked is how do I find the time to read it all. I confess it’s an addiction, but I tell them it’s really beefed up my ability to read and skim. Consuming information via feeds doesn’t have to be a two-hour daily session where I read and intellectually mull over the ideas. I’d rather read over all, check the ones I want to go back and digest more of, and see if I can spot trends–sort of analyze the popular topic trends in my aggregator. It’s what got me to use Twitter and Skype, two programs I thought initially were useless and time wasters, but now rely on a lot more than I want too. I see no problem with having many feeds, and i tell folks it has really racheted up my learning. I also tell folks it’s the equivalant to reading a magazine and/or a newspaper daily.
“Aggregator as Textbook”
On the higher ed front, this could work when the aggregation is collaborative.
I’ve been doing social bookmarking as a collaborative process with success ever since I stole the idea a few years ago.
It could be similar to wiki development… it might even be best served as a wiki
ideas for implementing this?
I am curious about what Andre Malan said. He said something about students not using RSS that much. I agree with that. I wonder why and I guess I must respectfully disagree a bit with you Will. Yes the technology of RSS feeds can be a bit disruptive but organizing, editing and discerning the important information about feeds and what you get from feeds takes a lot of cognitive work. Many people just don’t want to put this kind of work into things. I’m sometimes the same way. I have noticed, in my short career as a blogger, that if I have an article linked to my blog and discuss that article in great detail and ask others to contribute, I will get very little response. But if I post something short and I don’t ask people to analyze and keep my post on the lower end of Bloom’s Taxonomy, I get a greater comment response
Oh wow, yes, I struggle with these same questions! Who do you listen too? How long do you listen to them for?
RSS has indeed become my textbook, and more and more I am finding that my blog has become my ‘margin’ where I jot down my notes and thoughts. I bow to Artichoke and his post.
http://artichoke.typepad.com/artichoke/2007/08/pardon-the-egg-.html
Two relevant links –
1. Most folks here are talking about having students receive info via RSS, but what about using Twitter to reverse the information flow from student to others (students and teachers)? Offer your thoughts/suggestions here:
http://apaceofchange.edublogs.org/2007/08/08/promoting-twitteracy-in-the-classroom/
2. The Unofficial Google blog talks about “curing information overload” in Google Reader today:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/cure-information-overload-using-google.html
I have wondered how many to put in my Google Reader. I have only been using it for a few months (okay, I am slow), but find I have already changed some of those I read. I try to add others that I find interesting, but also find that if I miss even a day, I am swamped. I am impressed by the brilliance of some of you, but I struggle to work on lesson plans, read blogs, learn new Web 2.0 tools, and spend time with my family. I feel like I am working harder than ever. Yet I also believe this is what I have to do if I am going to be useful to my students.
This is a great start – but it seems to me that one of the critical skills we need to be teaching is how to let go of information flows. I’m an avid RSS user, but I have had to train myself away from the “clean your plate” club of information management. In other words – I have to be willing to simply delete large chunks of feeds anytime the reader gets too full. The trick is to trust that the good ideas will surface again, and again. You won’t miss them eventually.
Otherwise you just go insane managing the input and you never actually do anything with it – which is kind of the whole point to begin with. Informed action.