Week Four, Thing 1 -- RSS Feeds

Ahhhh, technology!

I just published the blog entry from the November Learning Conference (Building Learning Communities 08) because the wireless in the hotel kept going in and out and I couldn't publish while I was there. So even though it's dated today, the post was actually written days ago.

Which brings to mind, how do all these bloggers keep their sites updated? Some do, some don't. And you really have to be attached to your computer to be a force in the blogosphere. That's not going to happen for me anytime soon; there are too many other humans in my life pulling me away from the keyboard (and that's a good thing, I think.)

Anyway, RSS feeds and readers were something I already knew something about, so I thought this week would be a piece of cake, but I found it just the opposite. I got very confused trying out different aggregator options, from easy to hard. Some of the RSS out there is so available and user friendly that my 7 year old is doing it -- the downside of those is that you are limited by what you are offered. For example, you can make a fun iGoogle home page with tons of changing feeds in about two minutes. Most of the feeds are games and silly stuff that wastes time and bandwidth but it's so FUN!

When I tried to make a serious attempt at finding good library blogs worldwide and adding them to google reader (because that's the reader I had settled on) I got frustrated and overwhelmed. The technology definitely took over. I am still trying to decide on the best aggregator and then just use it. This takes time. I know my students don't have the time or the background to make these decisions, so it's been an important lesson to me in how we help them navigate all this information. We need to demystify, simplify, and remind them why they need a certain technology; or maybe that they don't. Right now I feel like I'm serving the RSS machine rather than it serving me. I'll keep plugging away and something will click eventually.