Pedagogy First!

Chapter 6 - Initial Thoughts

Hello, everyone!  I wanted to write a quick post to introduce myself.  I will be reading and making comments on your posts this week and next.  I read chapter 6 while waiting for my car to get fixed on Friday.  I found the focus on experimentation this week to be a nice way to start the chapter.

“As you experiment with sample units to create a prototype for your course, you will soon learn how to get the most out of whatever course management system or other software structure you are working in” (Ko & Rossen, 2008, p. 143).

Last semester many of you did a lot of experimentation with online tools.  I finished the Program for Online Teaching a couple of semesters ago, as a member of cohort 1, and feel that I am still constantly experimenting.  Some of this is due to my drive to make things work if I believe I can make them work the way I want them to work.  Some experimentation is forced because things change in online teaching (e.g., CMS changes, new tools…).  However, some experimentation is because all of you in this program give me new ideas to explore and try.  I cannot wait to hear what you all think this week about chapter 6.  I bet I will get some new ideas and I hope that I can send a few your way, too.

I have one final thought.  As I was reading the section on Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed readers on page 169, I remembered a great presentation I was able to attend last year.  Lisa M. Lane and Jim Sullivan presented a synchronous workshop in Elluminate called “Using Online Resources for Professional Development” back on May 7, 2010 that is recorded at the link below.  They focused on how to use RSS feeds to organize professional resources and keep up with the latest information in your field.  I enjoyed this presentation, which is why I am sharing it.  However, using RSS feeds for your own work might be a fun way to experiment with RSS feeds and see if you could make use of them in your classes, too.  I hope you enjoy the session if you get a chance to watch it: Using Online Resources for Professional Development with Lisa M. Lane and Jim Sullivan

-Laura Paciorek

Week - (5 + Misc) - Tool Thoughts + an RSS feed

I saw Pilar at a meeting today and she said something about how we can let the tools overwhelm us. I stopped for a minute and thought -- yes we do. There are so many. And always more new ones. Some are fairly simple and easy to use and understand. Some are complex and if we are timid, or short on time, we do not always know which end to push around. Want to poke it with a stick to see if it works in a manner that pleases us. Or is useful to us.

That is the one of the key points. Finding the right tools that are useful to what we are trying to do. Which means way more than trying every new tool out there. We need to figure out where we are going first. Then load up the tool box. Sime times we need the power tools. Sometimes a rock does just as well.

I also had lunch with a co-worker. I don't see him very often. At all really, Because of the ways things are with teaching in a community college. People come and go without contact with others from their department. Anyway - I am sort of on the bottom rung of the food chain in my department, so I look to him for advice on what's new with the web.

He is going to a web design seminar down in San Diego in November. "An Event Apart" put on by A List Apart. I wish that I could attend. Some of the sessions sound amazing.

Web 2.1: The Medium Comes of Age
The CSS3 Experience
Better Content by Design
Anatomy of a Design Decision
Learning To Love Humans—Emotional Interface Design
Hardboiled Web Design
How the Web Works

I added the RSS feed from A List Apart to my Google Reader. I can see they have mountains of information for me to roll around in and get excited about.

http://www.alistapart.com/site/rss

When we work as an island apart, we do not always get the mental stimulation we need. We fall behind the curve. Connecting with collegues can help stir up those creative juices. But adding this RSS feed will help as well. I like to know what is going on out there. In some ways it seems like HTML should be a static idea to teach, but it is changed from so many external and internal ways. Browsers update, change how they interpret code. Code gets depricated. New code comes forward. Of course HTML5 and CSS3 is slowly easing its way in. So even though I teach the beginning version, they need to know it is always in flux. Not only does code look different through each browser, on every monitor, but the way it loks today might be different next week. I tell them get comfortable, don't memorize, be ready for change and keep in touch with change. RSS feeds are a great way to do that.

Today was a good day of food for thought for me. I do need to stop trying to find a purpose for every new tool. Some just do not fit the niche in my tool box. I shouldn't let new tools overwhelm me. Yes, jump in and play with them. But if I think I have broken them, there are Lisa, Pilar, Jim and Karen K, plus all of you out there with great words of advice and perspective. Maybe I was looking at them from the wrong angle (upside doan?). And there are co-workers to share a spark closer to our homebase.

What's new and what works for me. Enough said.

~ Claudia

RSS for RIC

Like Andrea I have used IGoogle for some time.  However this assignment lead me to explore it further and to focus on items of relevance to online teaching.   I thought the "skinny jeans" site did provide a nice RSS for Dummies entree.  I also appreciate Richard's intro for database feeds.

It was very easy to set up the RSS in iGoogle, and once I found the right search input it was very easy to add.  Like many things on the web (or in a bookstore or library) it is easy to get distracted and sign=up for more than what I will have time to read.  Need to stay focuses. 

I am unsure how I will immediately adopt this to my course this semester, I read Lisa's experiment with her History of England posting and found that has possibilities for my class next semester, will be interested in a report out of how it went.

 

 

Database RSS

Since I had set up iGoogle a long time ago, I guess I have been RSS-ing all this time but haven't really thought about it. I get my daily dose of information from there.  I've customized certain features to include a daily picture of places that I would love to visit, and when I retire at 40 after having won the lottery, I'll definitely visit those places non-vicariously. I also use iGoogle to keep track of Apple innovations and get my daily dose of Apple iPhone rumors not on the AT&T network.  I use this tool to keep track of my stocks, occasionally read the latest gossip about celebrities whose names I recognize, check up on college and pro football scores and updates, and read Homer's (Simpson) words of wisdom.

For this reflection, I started thinking about information in relation to RSS feeds and found this source: "With all the vast amounts of information available on the web, it is becoming more and more difficult to sort through and find what you are looking for..." (Sharon Housley http://www.rss-specifications.com/what-can-be-published-with-rss.htm). See this YouTube example on information overload:

 

 

Housley continues, "... RSS significantly lowers the signal-to-noise ratio. RSS has the unique ability to compile information and filter it, so you only see unique and relevant content. The information superhighway has become packed with content, and those familiar with technology are using RSS to filter the content, allowing them to drill down and access only the content they want, without having to wade through all the noise."Now how to apply this to the educational arena, so that the feeds that are coming in are interesting?  I can see the use of daily stock tickers for an economics class. Or NASA updates for an astronomy class.  Or even video feeds for a class on film? 

Another important area (for Library resources) is the use of RSS feeds in research databases (Housely hints at this too).  For example, the library's most popular and most used database is ProQuest.  Conducting a search in ProQuest leads to a results page, where the option to choose an RSS feed link becomes available.  So, let's say a student wants information for a psychology class, and s/he uses the keywords "cognition"; "reasoning"; and "memory."  The search yields several resources, and the student has the option to tap into the "Create RSS Feed" link (see pics below) to get more information on the topic as it becomes available in ProQuest.

 

 

Here's the technical jargon from ProQuest on RSS feeds:

Creating an RSS Feed for a Recent Search You can create an RSS feed, to automatically notify you of new documents matching your search. Follow these steps to create an RSS feed:

1. Click Create RSS feed on the Results page, or from a list of your Recent Searches.
2. A new window will open, showing details for your RSS feed.
3. Copy the URL displayed next to Your RSS Feed.
4. Add the URL to your RSS Reader, or integrate it into your webpage.

The first time you access your RSS feed, no new documents will be available. However, as soon as new documents are available, your feed will be updated automatically with new information. Using your RSS Feed Your RSS Feed will be updated whenever new documents are available that match your search. You can link directly from a summary of the article to the full text in ProQuest, if available. You must login to ProQuest to see the full text. Your RSS Feed will expire after three months if it has not been viewed. What is an RSS Reader? RSS readers help you view the latest information from multiple sites at once. Many readers are freely available. There are many options; one web-based reader is available at http://www.bloglines.com.

 

iGoogle is My RSS Reader!

I have seen the RSS icon displayed on many websites before, but I didn’t know how it really worked. After reading the “RSS the Oprah Way” article, I decided to give it a try. I didn’t want to create another account to use this new tool so I created an iGoogle page since I already have a Gmail account. I was able to customize my page by adding all my Google gadgets, news, videos, and RSS from various blogs including “Pedagogy First”.  So far, I find this tool to be really convenient since I only have to login into one account to get instant updates of my most visited sites.

RSS as Building Block: Week 5/ Cohort 2

I am trying something with RSS feeds in my online class, History of England. Not sure where to go with it, but...

Moodle lets  you make blocks with RSS feeds. It's  little tricky. You have to cllick on Add/Edit Feeds, then add the feed URL. Then it puts them in a list with all the feeds, and you have to pick it out to add it to the block. Kind of like two steps when one would really do.

So, pedagogy first! The idea was to answer two needs. First, I ask my students to use primary sources in their discussion posts, and I always get a few asking where they should find these sources (although most do OK exploring on their own). I wanted to suggest some sites for sources, but of course these keep changing, so I wanted the list to update itself (I'm lazy). Second, I wanted a good place to store those sites for myself!

The result is a block that looks like this:




The tricky part is, it's a resource. Just a resource. I don't make them use it. I feel good doing it because it's there, and because I had to learn how to do it. I keep thinking, as it sits there on its own, that I could build a whole course around it.

I know of courses, advanced beyond what I can do, where the whole course IS built around feeds. It's the graduate anthropology classes of Michael Wesch, famous in the ed tech world for his video A Vision of Students Today, a class project that went viral in 2007. What I'm interested in is the way he uses RSS feeds to organize his who Digital Ethnography class: http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography . He's using a web-based aggregator (netvibes) to do this.

Perhaps one day my baby RSS feed can grow up into a whole class?

Week 5 Prompt: RSS and Newsreaders

Thanks for a lively week of discussion on pedagogy first. I especially appreciate those of you who have invested time responding to each other--that, to me, is the heart of this experience. Dialogue and exchange are what generate growth and new ideas.

As you discover cool new toys, remember not to let the toys and joys of playing with them overwhelm you. Keep your pedagogy first and use our conversations not as mandates to do new things but as opportunities to expand the collection of tools you feel advance your pedagogy and your approaches. I think most of you are thinking that way in your posts, but I just wanted to remind you that this blog has its title for a reason :)

Cohort 3 Week 5 Prompt

•   Learn about RSS feeds (try RSS the Oprah Way) and setup your own newsreader account (Google Reader, for example).
•   Locate a few useful online teaching or discipline-related blogs and/or news feeds and add them to your reader. Add the Pedagogy First! blog feed to your reader.
•   Create a blog post about what you discovered.

 

Cohort 2 Week 5 Prompt

Continue the process of reflection on your application of last semester's discoveries and providing feedback ideas to your colleagues--especially your cohort three colleagues--on the blog.

 

Week 5: Makeup post: RSS

OK, a big comment on Robert's post doesn't count! Neither does a long comment explaining how I'd use RSS on my own post in Week 9.

RSS fascinates me, primarily because it has not come far at all, as I posted on my own blog last September. Here is a tool that could revolutionize information gathering, and I'll be the number of people who know how to use it is low, and using it raises ones geek factor significantly. What a waste. In terms of technologies, I was first exposed to "news readers" at a conference of the National Social Science Association many years ago. I was enchanted with the idea, but tried one of the readers you download to your computer and was annoyed at having to open a separate program when everything I was trying to read was really "in" the browser. It wasn't until web-based feed aggregators came along that I started to use them. My first was Bloglines, which I didn't like I think because it was owned by the wrong company, then FeedRaider (you can still see all my crap there. As you can see, I collected too many feeds. It got huge. Took a long time to load. Was annoying. The house being thus full of all my acquired stuff, I did the natural thing. NO, not clean house. MOVE.

I'm now at Google Reader, because it's handy and it does what I want -- lets me organize into folders (I have one called "Must Read!"). I'm still confused by its sharing and commenting aspects, but overall it's very convenient. One thing that's especially impressive is that it will find the feed for a site even if you can't find it on the page, which reduces, if not eliminates, some of the geekiness. Also, if you're logged in, you can click on the RSS symbol on most blogs, and it will ask if you want to save it in Reader or iGoogle, and if you choose Reader it puts the feed in for you -- no geeky copying and pasting.

RSS - Ideas For How You Might Use RSS With Your Class

An RSS is a handy way to

(1) Keep aware of current events
(2) Watch for any new information or updates   

(3)  Share a list of resources that you (or a team has) created -
Below are my YouTube videos that cover the One-Way ANOVA... and if I add a new one, or replace an older video - the RSS automatically takes that in stride and provides an updated list:

Go ahead and click on one of the video titles - the video opens up in the widget.  Click on the video as it plays, and the YouTube site will open to the video (for larger screen dimensions). 

(4) Share a list of student projects posted on the web -
Requires that students tag the project with a particular tag (and using Yahoo Pipes - you could pull from multiple web 2.0 sources that you've indicated to your students are appropriate tools)

(5) keep your links 'live' to resources - though you give up control on the exact resources ('avoid link rot')
by creating a specific search term
(6) A fun, ever changing list - give students a sense of the variability on a topic

__________
To create an RSS feed, I have found Yahoo Pipes to be a great resource.  This morning, I went back to Yahoo Pipe to create an RSS of YouTube videos that had the tags "ProfKelley ANOVA -Google"...  using another person's created Yahoo Pipe.  But you'll notice that my ANOVA videos are meant to be watched in sequence.  So I copied the Yahoo Pipe, edited it, so that the output would be sorted by title.  Now the list looks much more organized.  I saved the RSS feed url, and put it into the Ning.  Done!  

For this post, I needed a widget to provide the RSS feed list (Ning has one already built in).  A little web searching turned up this helpful article 'Embedding Yahoo Pipes with a Single Click.'  The article starts off with a quick confession that its not just a simple click - though fairly straightforward.  The other sites involved were www.yahoo.com/pipes and www.grazr.com.

Here is a screencast for the 'show and tell' of my RSS adventure.

Robert

P.S.  Note - along the lines of having a fun, ever changing list....  Here's an RSS Widget that displays the RSS feed for videos containing the term 'VoiceThread' from both YouTube and Viddler, then combins that list and sorts it alphabetically. 

A Two Hour Adventure Playing with RSS - Suggestions?

I've been playing with creating RSS to pull content matching search criteria from YouTube and PsycArticles.  My batting average is .500, but barely.  Using Yahoo Pipes, I was able to get the RSS URL for YouTube Videos on the topic One-Way ANOVA.  That RSS URL was then provided to a NING widget, and 'ta da!' I have an RSS within NING.  Next stop, identify articles in PsycArticles where the data analysis was done using the One-Way ANOVA.  Hooray - there was an RSS feed button.  Unfortunately (and this doesn't make sense) - you had to login to view the RSS!  There might be a way around this, so I haven't given up on it yet.  I'm checking in with our excellent librarians.

Here's a brief screencast of my RSS in Ning, and how I got it there.  Still so very new at this.

OK - so far I am exploring RSS for a list of tutorials and also applications of the one-way ANOVA statistical test.  Does anyone else have ideas how I might use RSS for my behavioral statistics course?

Any other ideas?

Robert

P.S. Played with RSS and iGoogle a few months back, and that was cool.  Though it has been awhile since I've gone back to it.  In reading the posts of others, I especially saw RSS as a great way to keep up on any school announcements related to one's children.  I also wonder - in terms of using RSS in Ning, if some perhaps inappropriate content might show up (i.e., via a YouTube search).  I remember seeing some example syllabi where there was a specific clause mentioned that the student may encounter material that could potentially be offensive (and what about under 18 students?)