RSS on the WWW

Years ago I tried using an RSS feed aggregator inside of Mozilla's Thunderbird. It was great at first. All of the blog posts and new articles on my favorite football teams or from my favorite news sources came right to my email application. I could scan through them quickly to stay abreast of the latest.

Eventually, however, I added too many feeds. Missing a day of checking them off as Read meant that the number of new posts grew to unrealistic amounts. It felt overwhelming, and I started ignoring that part of Thunderbird by marking all new entries as Read. The whole thing became a bit of a waste.

Later, I found out about Mozilla's live bookmarks, and that was exactly what I needed! The browser could hold ten or so of my favorite feeds, and no longer did I feel like I had 50 email inboxes that were filling up. Instead, the feeds were just button I could hold the mouse over to check if anything new had been published. This is the way I still use RSS feeds.

In the classroom, an RSS feed aggregator could greatly aid courses in finding the latest on a topic under study. For example, in an ELA class studying Shakespeare, the class could set up an account for news and publication feeds about Shakespeare and his plays. It could be a weekly part of the curriculum to check the class feeds and summarize news on Shakespeare research or performances.

An class assignment of this type would satisfy numerous Common Core objectives. In particular, this standard really jumps out in my mind:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.8
Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the usefulness of each source in answering the research question; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation.

The portions about "using advanced searches effectively" and "assess the usefulness of each source" strike me as particularly relevant.

This activity would apply to ISTE-S (ISTE - Student PDF) in that students would have to "select and use applications effectively and productively" (6.b) and "evaluate and select information sources based on the appropriateness to specific tasks" (3.c).

Learning and Using Wikis

In graduate school, some of my classmates and I had a habit of editing entries on Wikipedia whenever we came across something we found incorrect or poorly written. Also, there is a wiki for college jobs in the field of Classical Studies that an anonymous owner updates annually. Professionals in the market for a position often check it and update it based on job offers and acceptances. Therefore, I was already quite familiar with the nature and function of a wiki.

I have wanted to build my own wiki and learn more about managing a wiki for a couple of years now. It seems like a good way to keep those serving in different ministries of my church informed about ongoing projects. The wiki created for this assignment (http://orderedmusings.pbworks.com) will be a good place to test out how to organize different pages of a wiki. Setting up and editing the first page on PBwiki was easy, but there are several aspects of the layout and widgets that will take me some time to become comfortable using. Also, designing an intuitive page hierarchy in my wiki will require some thought.

If I were to use a wiki in my classroom, it would probably be a place for the students of a class to develop a literary encyclopedia. Each of my classes could create encyclopedia (Wikipedia-style) on a literary work, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for example. Each student would be required to generate a page on a character and to correct or add to another character's page. During class time, I could have the students write plot summaries for each scene as we read them. One of the pages would serve as the To-Do list of characters and scenes that need to be entered.

This use of a wiki supports Common Core objectives for ELA in several areas. Of course there are objectives like frequency of writing (ELA-W9-10.10) and production and distribution (ELA-W9-10.4, 5, 6) that are directly fulfilled in an assignment like this. Additionally, this assignment would hit on all six of the domains in the ISTE standards for students.

My Use of Blogs

The first blog that had any significant impact on me was Vincent Cheung’s now defunct blog on theology and Christian philosophy (www.vincentcheung.com). It was 2004 when a friend turned me on to the blog because we derived so much from Cheung’s regular entries. It was almost like getting to know the man and spend time with him on a regular basis. I recall feeling disappointed when I would check his blog and find nothing new.

From that experience I went on to visit several other blogs regularly. Bryn Mawr hosts a blog dedicated to reviews of published works in the field of Classical Studies (http://www.bmcreview.org/). During graduate school, it was helpful to have a quick place to check the latest in my field. Later, another friend introduced me to a blog where a former Classics graduate aggregated interesting articles on the ancient world, archaeology, and trends in scholarship, sometimes with a humorous spin (http://rogueclassicism.com/). More recently, I have frequented blogs for law and politics like the Volokh Conspiracy (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/) and blogs for religious issues like The Gospel Coalition (http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/).

Blogs are now a regular part of my Web diet.

I do not intend to use blogs with my students this year. The primary reason I am unlikely to use a blog is the focus of my course in the school’s overall sequence. Tenth-grade English at CCHS is used in large part to work on formal, academic style in writing. My impression is that blogs typically engender an informal approach to writing among students. Additionally, my class emphasizes the use of particular formatting (MLA), and blogs seemingly do not lend themselves to reinforcement of these goals.

From a legal and ethical framework, the greatest challenge is the safe implementation of a web publication for children. Certainly, no educational objective is worth harm to a student. It has been a good to read about the different methods teachers use to keep student identities and locations safe. Instructionally, I think the greatest difficulty is for teachers to tie the use of blogs, like many technologies, to instructional objectives. That is not to say that there are none, but many teachers struggle to make the use of technology about little more than novelty. One of the benefits of using technology in the classroom is that doing it well requires a teacher to have a strong sense of alignment between the tool or method and the objectives.

If I were to use a blog, it would probably be as an additional outlet for creative writing. The class has a segment near the end of the year on Poe’s short stories, and I ask the students to write in Poe’s style. It would both the Creation and Innovation and the Communication and Collaboration standards for students to post their short stories with some image, requiring that each student respond to another’s post by identifying the elements of Poe’s style in the student blog entry.

Back to Blogging

It has been more than three years since I last blogged. In that time many things about my life have changed. However, using a blog for self-expression and easy publication remains a great tool.

I intend to return to posting my occasional ruminations here at Ordered Musings. This is a convenient place to work out my thoughts and keep notes that I might not otherwise record. Just looking back at this blog showed me how many moments of inquiry can become launching points for creative expression. In all honesty, I don't even remember writing those posts. I remember being surprised by the word butter in the LXX, but I have no recollection of Homeric apostrophes. It's a sad admission.

What this demonstrates, however, is how useful a blog can be for chronicling all sorts of journeys in life.