Feeding Your Inner Power Learner! Learning to Leverage RSS – Brent Schlenker

Feeding – has to do with bringing in content into your rss feeds – learning

Learning 2.0 – shifting from only a consumer to a content creator as well. This happens in classroom based learning as well when you need to prove what you have learned, discuss what you have learned.

In the web world it can be as simple as an email you send to one person looking to build on information you know. If you send this out to a million people (rss feed) then think of how much additional information you can gather back from all those people.

You can create and publish simple info (text) through mobile devices.
Posting pictures on flickr and storing to your blog as well. Similar with YouTube.

Then with an RSS feed from you blog many people around the web can now access your text, photo, video, etc.
RSS is a form of publication with little to no barriers. Anyone who has access can produce this type of content.

RSS – Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary (less popular defn)

The Basics of what an RSS is:
Stephen Downes – An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers
Common Craft – RSS in Plain English

Once you more thoroughly understand how can learn and utilize these tools better you will then be better able to develop the content yourself.

When choosing technology you might want to speak with your IT dept about what product might work best with your system/bandwidth.

5 THINGS that every type of content should be:
searchable
editable
linkable
taggable
feedable

RSS is one way you can off load a lot of information that you are gathering and place them into a different form. Ie: instead of getting emailed newsletters, you can have feeds populate into your RSS reader.

A great tip is to set aside time to look at your feeds daily. This will help you to manage your feeds and continue to learn from them and in turn probably find the need to find more and more feeds to learn from.

***Brent’s side tangent – the more you learn the more you desire to learn

Use the feeder’s search field to narrow down what you might be looking for.
Use folders to sort the RSS feeds into topics.
Use date sort to look at what is current and what is right now.
Use flags to remember and go back to.
Use Googles’ ZXing Decoder.
Use Shared Items.
Use email features to send feeds to friends that might be interested to the content item.

Filter posts from a RSS feed (ie: De.lico.us can send just a topic)

*Some blogs allow authors to categorize their posts and you only subscribe to the feeds of that category. This based on the blog publishing tool selected though.

Different systems show, display, filter, and organized these feeds in different ways. You may want to try a few different ones to find the one that you like and suits your needs.

Homework from Brent:

1. find the content creator location that you want to get content from, find it’s rss feed location (blogs, wikis, website, etc)
2. set up a google reader account (many people use this one and there is a lot of help out there if you need it for use – ie: Brent, myself, others
3. subscribe (THIS IS CRITICAL) to the feed (podcasts are RSS feeds – ie: itunes podcasts) so that you can being your learning from this feed