Over the past month or so, we have taken our students in GRAD 602 on a carefully scaffolded journey through web technology to support teaching and learning. With Jeff Nugent and our graduate fellow, David McLeod, we have laid out how the web is impacting the landscape of learning, suggested the use of Chickering and Gamson’s 7 Principles as a lens for determining the use of technology for learning, and then introduced students to blogging (public reflective practice), Twitter (networked communication), and Diigo (tagging and social bookmarking). We complete our review of digital technology tonight by discussing the notion that – through RSS – you can rewire the web to customize the information flow one receives, as we are doing with Netvibes.
Yet, as we have prepared for tonight’s lesson, I am beginning to wonder about RSS as a topic. It seems that the orange icon is disappearing off many websites, as is the functionality. I noticed this week that Inside Higher Ed still has RSS feeds from its top level news, but that the feeds for subcategories like Teaching and Learning have disappeared. Feed for the tag “grad602” in Diigo pulls up links tagged last spring semester, but nothing from this January or February (and there has been no response to questions posted in the Diigo Help Blog for this issue). Another prof at VCU who also has his journalism students using a class tag in Diigo had the same problem, and has shifted back to Delicious for class tagging.
It is not that the concept of pulling rather than pushing information has died. Lee Lefever’s RSS in Plain English still resonates with me…but this video was done five years ago, and five years in the web is a lifetime. Feed still seems to be an underlying concept to sites like Facebook and the new social and participatory site – Pinterest. But aggregation? My “old school” but go to aggregator – Google Reader – is still part of my daily professional life…but it seems to be getting harder to build my own personal one-stop portal. Perhaps, as David suggested, this is simply a reality of the web becoming more monetized. If I am pulling to my reader, I am not seeing the ads back on the pages from which I pull.
So Jeff suggested that we might need to shift our focus from aggregation to curation. Which raises the question (and it is not really a new question): What is our role as faculty in curating content for our students…and what is their role? How do you see this playing out in your classes? Is aggregation an outdated concept? How do you see your role changing? Is this role different for K12 teachers versus undergraduate versus graduate faculty?
Let me know your thoughts…
{Photo Credit: Oleg Sh}
