Blogs and RSS: Teaching and Collaboration in Academia

Teaching with Technology Roundtable

Monday November 14th, 1 pm
Connecticut Room
Buley Library

Blogs (weblogs) and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) are not new, but the implications for higher education are just beginning to be explored. Current awareness, research collaboration, reflection as an educational and professional development tool, automatic website updating, and a tour of academic blogs will be covered.

Blogs

Blogs are chronologically (mostly) organized websites with a simple entry system for adding new content.

A few blogs written by faculty and/or researchers, and sometimes their students, too:

Blogging

There are many guides to blogging. Here are just a few useful sites and articles on academic blogging:

RSS

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It is an XML format that allows automated retrieval of new content *without* manually visiting the website. RSS feeds can be read in newsreaders, some email programs, some web browsers, but are not generally human readable without some "translation" by a reader program.

 

WebCT screen shots:

 

Other Blog-like Technologies in the classroom

There are lots of new technologies coming up as people explore the read-write web, collaborative technology, and the student-teacher interactions that are built from these technologies. Here are just a few (really cool) new sites and/or new uses: