Keeping Current on Educational Resources

1. Camille AndrewsMann Library, Cornell University Spring 2008 Keeping Current on Educational Resources

2. Icebreaker As you come in, note the following: Your name, where you’re from and what you do What you use to keep current now and what you hope to get out of this At least one professional development resource you use If you have time, share this with another participant and add at least the last two points as a comment to the first blog post at http://mannclassblog.edublogs.org/

3. Overview Getting resources What is RSS and how do I find and read RSS feeds? What are blogs and how do I find and read them? Bloglines Keeping resources, browsing others’, and sharing What is social bookmarking? del.icio.us

4. What is RSS? Alternately called: RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary Rich Site Summary Really Simple Syndication (this last one seems to have won out) Way to syndicate content--to make content come to you without you having to check for updates on a continual basis

5. Why You Would Use RSS If you want an efficient way to monitor lots of sources of information News Audio & video New books Favorite blogs E-mail Journals and databases Tables of contents Web page updates Curriculum modules *Steinhart, Gail and Nathan Rupp. (2005) “Keeping Current with RSS.”

6. Advantages to RSS Less clicking and more reading! Helps to keep track of frequently AND infrequently updated sites Less spam and ads Only action items in your e-mail inbox Information presented how YOU want it on demand; easily skimmed *Steinhart, Gail and Nathan Rupp. (2005) “Keeping Current with RSS.”

7. Six reasons to read feeds Current awareness and personal information management Conversations taking place and subjects being discussed here that aren't elsewhere Faster updates Easy to explore other fields For fun!

8. Disadvantages to RSS Some feeds just have a headline or excerpt, no full text Your favorite site may not yet have RSS—but you can created a feed for the site (more on this later) You were once clicking to 200 sites a day, now you’re reading 200 RSS feeds! One more place to check *Steinhart, Gail and Nathan Rupp. (2005) “Keeping Current with RSS.”

9. How to get RSS Feeds To read them, you need an RSS or feed reader, aka a news aggregator-software program that collects and reads RSS feeds desktop (Sharp Reader (PC) or NetNewsWire (Mac)) web-based (Bloglines; Google Reader; and MyYahoo) Browser-based (Firefox) can be paid or free See list of readers at http://allrss.com/rssreaders.html -from Peter Scott's RSS Compendium

10. Setting up an RSS reader Bloglines- http://www.bloglines.com/ Web-based so I can read it anywhere Free Easy to set up Not just for blogs but for any feed Username: mann_ref@cornell.edu; Password: mannclass Pick a couple of subscriptions from their list just to see how it works Some things you can do with Bloglines: Add and delete feeds Clip, keep or email items Organize feeds and clippings into folders *Steinhart, Gail and Nathan Rupp. (2005) “Keeping Current with RSS.”

11. How to get RSS Feeds* Your news aggregator(Bloglines Quick Picks) Feed locators and search engines NewsIsFree: http://www.newsisfree.com/ 2RSS.com: http://www.2rss.com/ Feedster: http://www.feedster.com/ Syndic8: http://www.syndic8.com/ You can use Google to check particular sites site:nea.org rss *Steinhart, Gail and Nathan Rupp. (2005) “Keeping Current with RSS.”

12. How do you know it’s an RSS Feed? Little orange XML, Atom or RSS button or text; syndicate this site Your browser will show it (Firefox (including Live Bookmarks or RSS Reader plugin), Safari, Opera; IE7) Subscription buttons Addon tools like RSS panel for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/635/) *Steinhart, Gail and Nathan Rupp. (2005) “Keeping Current with RSS.”

13. Feed examples for education News NY Times Education: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/education/(scroll to bottom and click on Add NY Times RSS feeds to get to feed) CNN Education: http://www.cnn.com/EDUCATION/?eref=rss_education Education Week and Teacher Magazine: http://www2.edweek.org/info/about/rss_feeds.html Curriculum MERLOT: http://rss.merlot.org/ NSDL: http://nsdl.org/resources_for/k12_teachers/?pager=newsfeed Stats/Research National Center for Education Statistics: http://nces.ed.gov/help/rss.asp Association NEA: http://www.nea.org/newsletters/NEARSS.html Ed.gov: http://www.ed.gov/rss/edgov.xml

14. RSS & blogs RSS feeds From many sources Usually automatically generated by blogs

15. What are Blogs? "Blog/WebLog: a web page containing brief, chronologically arranged items of information. A blog can take the form of a diary, journal, what's new page, or links to other web sites." Most blogging software produces RSS feeds. Scott, Peter. (2001) “Blogging: Creating Instant Content for the Web.” Internet Librarian 2001, Pasadena, CA http://library.usask.ca/%7Escottp/il2001/definitions.html

16. Blog title Post date (in reverse chrono-logical order) and title Links, Previous posts, or Blogroll Post and links to other sites/blogs Comments Archives

17. What kinds of blogs are there? Pundit, news, and political blogs (“citizen journalists”) Personal journals and diaries Business/corporate blogs Organizational and project blogs (including blogs for communities of interest and practice) For professional development For organizational knowledge management Not all text-based: Picture, audio (podcasting), and video (screen or vodcasting)

18. How to Find Them? Blogging indexes and search engines Technorati-http://www.technorati.com/ Google Blog Search-http://google.com/blogsearch Daypop--any regularly updated current events http://www.daypop.com/ Your news aggregator (e.g. Bloglines)

19. How to Find Them? • Blogrolls and Blog Recommendation Pages • Blogrolls-Lists of links to other blogs the author is reading found in the sidebars • Links to other blogs within posts • Blog recommendation pages and awards • EduBlog Awards (http://www.incsub.org/awards/)

20. Blogs in education Personal Weblogg-ed: The Read/Write Web in the Classroom-http://www.weblogg-ed.com/ Assorted Stuff-http://www.assortedstuff.com/ Eduwonk-http://www.eduwonk.com/ Classroom Applied Science research class-http://www.appliedscienceresearch.blogspot.com/ Organizational Associations Association for Educational Technology http://www.aect-members.org/

21. A few caveats on blog reading As with all information, evaluate! Accuracy, currency, purpose, reliability, coverage, bias Often good for personal opinion, current trends, current awareness Not always good for scholarly or comprehensive reference Realize that “facts” and opinions change and always verify information Preaching to the choir or the problem of audience

22. Exercise Log into the class account or create your own Find some feeds using: Bloglines Quick Picks Feed search engines Your favorite resources (Browse or search using Google to see if they have feeds) Add them to the Bloglines account

23. If there’s no RSS feed. . . Create one using Page2RSS http://www.page2rss.com/ Subscribe to e-mail using your news aggregator (see Bloglines e-mail subscription feature) You can create RSS feeds for searches, use Bloglines e-mail to subscribe to Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en) ; or use a service that allows you to subscribe to website searches

24. Other RSS tricks If you want to combine a number of feeds into one. . . Use a free service like Feedblendr (http://feedblendr.com), Blogdigger groups (http://groups.blogdigger.com/index.jsp) or Bloglines playlists If you want to add an RSS feed to a website, use a service like Feed2JS (http://feed2js.org)

25. Still prefer e-mail? Use one of the following services to turn RSS into e-mail: FeedBlitz (http://www.feedblitz.com/) Other applications like Mail2RSS (see http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss2email.htm)

26. Keeping what you find Bloglines lets you: Email posts Add them to a private clippings file Add them to a public blog

27. See What Other People Are Reading Bloglines *Steinhart, Gail and Nathan Rupp. (2005) “Keeping Current with RSS.”

28. See what other people are reading When you find someone with similar interests, you may also find blogs or information sources they are tracking that you might be interested in. . . Will Richardson of Weblogg-ed’s Bloglines account http://www.bloglines.com/public/wrichard

29. Another way of tracking. . . See what others are reading and save through. . . Social Bookmarking!

30. Social Bookmarking: What Is It? (1) Web-based system of bookmarks or favorites Accessible from any Internet-connected computer No more finding you’ve saved a bookmark you need on your home computer while you’re at work No more e-mailing links between computers Easy to save things from your browser (bookmarklets)

31. What Is It? (2) Everyone “tags” saved websites with their own keywords i.e., I could save Mann Library website with tags like mann, mannlibrary, library, myjob, etc. No more bookmarking in multiple folders and allows multiple categorizations and uses

32. What Is It? (3) Extra-Special Feature! Collaborative--everyone can see what you bookmarked and how you’ve tagged (though some applications allow privacy) In looking at what others have tagged with the same or similar words, you can discover other resources

33. Social bookmarking applications Del.icio.ushttp://del.icio.us/ Popular general social bookmarking site Mann Library Class test site Username: mannlibraryclass Password: mannclass Main features: Page Title Description (optional) URL Tags

34. Exercise Log into the Mann class account or create your own and try tagging some resources Look at a tag, see if you can find another useful resource, and save it to the Mann account (or your own)

35. Other social bookmarking applications Furl-http://www.furl.net/index.jsp General service like del.icio.us but also saves page and allows comments, rating of pages Citeulike-http://www.citeulike.org/ for academics (allows academic citation info, export into BibTex format, notes, includes lots of biological and medical papers)

36. Not just web bookmarks • Flickr-http://www.flickr.com/ • Photos • 43 Things-http://www.43things.com/ • Things to do • LiveJournal, Technorati • Blog posts

37. Which one? Social Bookmarking Comparison Toolhttp://www.consultantcommons.org/node/239 Not limited to just one Multiple bookmarklet toolhttp://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/marklet_maker.php

38. Caveats about tagging Everyone calls everything something different (blogs, blog, blogging; tagging, folksonomy, del.icio.us, social bookmarking) Synonyms and multilingual issues (rose- pink in French, flower in English) Perspective (me, toread, torec) Spam Back up your bookmarks Free for now but later?

39. Tagging is good for browsing finding other people’s opinions and interests catching latest trends, triangulating terms and concepts http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/ new things, things that change over time

40. General RSS resources: RSS compendium: http://allrss.com/ Lockergnome: http://channels.lockergnome.com/rss/ RSS tutorial: http://rssgov.com/rssworkshop.html RSS tutorial for content publishers and webmasters: http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/ And many many more… More information on RSS

41. More information on blogs The Internet Courses: Weblogs-Dr. L. Anne Clyde, Professor, Faculty of Social Science, The University of Iceland--http://www.hi.is/~anne/weblogs.html Weblogs Compendium—Peter Scotthttp://www.lights.com/weblogs/ “Blogging 101”-Jenny Levine (The Shifted Librarian), http://www.sls.lib.il.us/infotech/presentations/2005/ola-blogging.pdf

42. More info on social bookmarking April 2005 issue of DLib magazine “Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Overview” - Tony Hammond, et al. (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html) “Social Bookmarking Tools (II): A Case Study – Connotea” - Ben Lund, et al. (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html) del.icious bookmarks for this workshop http://del.icio.us/tag/Mannteachers

43. More info on using tools for classroom activities Richardson, Will. (2006) Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press (available at TCPL)

44. Questions? Contact me at:255-8673 or ca92@cornell.edu Thanks for coming and good luck keeping current!