Costco VS The Personal Shopper: RSS

You Just Have To Run In And Out…

Jan leaves a voice message at noon that she and the kids are coming over after work.

You don’t have time for any false moves, so it’s Guerilla Shopping: site target, acquire target, and get out with minimum collateral damage.

You’ve got the list in your head: veggie platter, fruit platter, and one of those giant ready-to-bake pizzas. But first parking…where to park? Your stomach starts to tighten. You decide to parking-spot-stalk that lady who’s rolling out of the exit with her huge cart, wobbly with cartons of bottled water, the 24-can Coke case and the striped acrylic rug for her back door. You grit your teeth thinking, oh my gosh, how much time do I have and what is this Costco trip REALLY going to cost me?

After three laps around her parking stall, you see her finally pulling out as you duck in, ignoring the dirty looks of the Ford F350 dually who puts his signal light on at the last second hoping to cut you off and scoop the spot.

As you park and trot towards the entrance your heart sinks. Already you can see the line-ups...they run all the way to the candy aisle and it looks like everyone here today is stocking up for their family reunion or their day camp. Your stomach now flips as you imagine your sister-in -law and the kids speeding down the Anthony Henday, getting to your empty, dark house before you and your frantic cleaning of this morning’s breakfast dishes and the dead toast crusts on the counter.

You now start to jog as you head towards the entrance. But not so fast… you need your user name and password to get in. Oh crap, you drop your sunglasses as you fumble to open your purse, then fish out your wallet and shuffle the 21 other plastic passwords in the zip pocket. Finally you dig out your member card, flash it to the bored looking lady at the gate and you’re into the site. It’s now been 20 minutes since you first pulled into the Costco turn off and you now feel panicky. Already this mission is going badly.

As you sprint down the aisle you’re scanning like a bird dog: tires, bras, dishwashing soap – you make a mental tag that you really do need to stop at look at these sometime, and wait...Costco now has laminate flooring? Well, there is that basement project that you’ve had on hold...what’s this – The Shack is here for $9.99! Christmas lists flip through your head and you instinctively reach to grab three copies. As you toss them into your cart like Lebron James shooting from the centre line, you are now dashing to get to the very back of the warehouse where the food is. But as you race past the trampolines and kayaks, you can smell a cooking sample station and it’s Fettuccini Alfredo in the little white paper cups. It wouldn’t hurt just to grab one, okay two, 'cause you missed lunch today and that tiny sample could hold you until supper. Oh look, antifreeze is on sale with a coupon this week and your husband never thinks to buy it until November….

Forty-three minutes after pulling into the parking lot you have finally arrived at the check out. But five carts are ahead of you and it looks like the house wins yet again as you have crap-shot the slowest line. There’s not even a trashy magazine to read while you wait and then it hits you that the pizza in your cart will take another 20 minutes to bake even after you get home. You are tempted..no? yes? Yes, mission aborted!

You abandon your now half -full cart and walk away, stumbling toward the exit.

All that wasted time and you still don’t have what you came looking for. Dialing Pizza 73, you try to find your car, only to spot it wedged between the RV and the F350 dually that has purposely ran its right back tire over the yellow line, making it impossible for you to open your car door.









You start to cry.
What you wouldn’t give for a personal shopper about now.









Your Personal Shopper Anticipates Your Needs: Why would you use an RSS?

If you think of the Internet as a giant Costco, then consider the blog aggregator or the RSS as your personal shopper. RSS allows you the user, to decide what content is delivered right to your computer door without you having to go to each individual site. RSS feeds are now becoming the primary vehicle for accessing the web, for there isn’t enough time in the day to go to each of your favorite websites, blogs picture or video sites and see what’s new. And there is the advantage of a topic focus. Your focus. After all, why look at bras and tires when you came for pizza?

Instead you can use a reader like Google Reader to find your subscribed sites and continually bring updates to you. It’s is not unlike that online grocery delivery service, Pic ‘N Del, that brings your groceries to your door after you have selected them online.

Since its introduction in the late 1990s, RSS has become an excellent mechanism for distributing regularly updated content and is a natural complement to blogs, news sites, photo-sharing applications, and podcasts. I even found one for birthdays!

This is a detailed RSS video for future reference or to be used for a PD Day:



If you saw my closet, you would notice that I tend to keep stuff. I have the same problem collecting blogs and websites. My bookmarks toolbar is full and my bookmarks menu is overflowing. But Google Reader is like my tupperware drawer and helps me keep a semblance of organization to my favorites. Here you will find a nice tidy list of all my classmates' blogs as well as a few other educators' blogs that I have subscribed to because either these blogs tend to come up over and over in references, or perhaps I just like a poster's writing style that may resonate with my progress at this point in my technojourney. Tucked inside Reader, I have also some podcasts, newcasts, and Twitters I follow. I have a couple of subscriptions outside of "education" and my teaching subject areas and I hope to expand this when there is time to explore. At this point I barely tag and have not yet commented except on my classmates posts. Some of my subscribed sites I have put in my side widgets on my blog but it is getting cluttered as it is!

It will be interesting to see how my subscriptions inside Reader evolve as I travel further along this journey. I expect I will outgrow some sites and Twitters and others that I do not comprehend at this point, I may yet see value further down the road. Yes, even I do eventually throw some clothes out and buy new ones that fit better!

And speaking of fit, RSS and blog aggregators are also a perfect fit for education.

• If you would like to see a great list of specific uses for RSS in education, rather than have me add two more screens to this posting, go to Sharon Housley’s place for examples.

• And if you want to see good examples of how the pros have used aggregators in the classroom check out the Landmark Project:

This is David Warlick’s RSS News Feeds Generator, designed to help teachers create RSS feeds for aggregating news stories from Google Reader that are related to curriculum topics and issues. You should know that this web tool was inspired by the work of Will Richardson, author of RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators. To see the original, go here THEN CLICK ON RSS GUIDE AT TOP OF HIS BLOG.

Richardson uses Pageflakes to demo how anyone can create topic-specific portals with feeds. His sample page is about Darfur and it is built on tag feeds from YouTube for videos, Flickr for photos, the New York Times AND the Sudan Tribune for news, del.icio.us for what people are bookmarking, and Google Blogsearch for blogs. He says, “What you get is a dynamic, constantly updated page of content about what’s happening in that part of the world and what’s happening in other parts of the world in response.”
From Will Richardson: Using Pageflakes as Student Portal


Your Personal Shopper Knows What You Like: More Applications for Education


But our topic focus for this blog is how might we use RSS for professional development? Here are some practical applications.

For example, our school, our school division, or my OPPT specialist council might provide one RSS feed for a main news page for sharing general information. But other feeds might focus on a department within the division, such as Student Services. There could also be a feed for a district pilot project such as the district Laptop Project, or even feeds for specific courses, such as my Social Studies. Staff members could then independently subscribe to the feeds in their own particular area of professional development. Even current action research, such as our AISI project could be updated to a community of learners, creating a link between learning and data creation.

Additionally, RSS could be used for our staff updates on students’ academic or disciplinary information. RSS could even replace the e-mail newsletter, and the resultant issues of privacy or spam. RSS usage can be tracked and this data can be helpful to our teachers’ groups to see how effective the RSS is.

Your Personal Shopper Knows the Pitfalls

You the user must do the initial legwork and locate and test sources to see if they are reliable and useful. That takes time and effort. Also if you are relying strictly on RSS feeds making choices for you from a website, you will miss your own scan of a homepage that may turn up something useful. Additionally, an RSS search for content in articles or papers whose content will never change may not be the best choice for this particular task. RSS tools, however, are evolving with ever-expanding applications and these obstacles may be overcome.

Your Personal Shopper Expands Your Tastes: Larger Implications for Professional Development

Here this blog is going to take a different tack from my usual “scan and glean” approach. I have travelled up and down the aisles of the Costco Internet and have seen many applications and examples of the wonders of blogging aggregates and RSS for professional development. But my personal experience with social media and professional development is only six weeks old – thus I have turned to action researchers-my own personal shoppers.

I stumbled upon discussions of the merits of teachers’ professional development through the joining of established social communities relative to the value of creating one’s own community through reflective blogging. I had no idea this philosophical divide existed!
Sessums (2007) asked whether educators learn through social media differently than in face-to-face contexts. He further questioned how professional development through social media informs educators’ practices.

Glogowski (2007) also has examined professional development through social media and observed:

Teacher professional development can no longer rely solely on conferences and scholarly journals. While those two sources can still play an important role in helping us become better educators, it is the power of networks that can be especially beneficial. However, I am not too enthusiastic about the recent emergence of online communities for educators, such as Classroom 2.0, School 2.0, or Library 2.0. Frankly, much like David Warlick, I really don’t get it. I think I’m in favor of building networks, not getting stuck in communities.

Glogowski describes the problem of these types of sites becoming closed communities that ultimately limit the nature of the professional growth. He observed, “It is interesting that, instead of building our own networks using RSS, for example, instead of charting our own paths as professionals and educators, we prefer to confine ourselves to pre-defined boxes.”


Shah (2007) also encourages teachers to move beyond the walled sites where teachers have a tendency to “park” or maintain a discussion rather than seeking out a place where they are actively and consistently blogging in an attempt to make sense of their practice. “The Internet along with blogs, podcasts, screencasts, RSS, and comments, give us the ability to create ad hoc networks where we can engage in much more meaningful conversations than would be possible in a closed community.”

While Glogowski acknowledges that particularly for networking novices, there is a benefit to joining existing professional social communities rather than being intimidated by the task of starting one’s own blog, he has concerns:

And yet, I keep thinking that these social networking sites are essentially classrooms for grown-ups, places where the conversation is likely to be dominated by only a few individuals, and not necessarily those who have the most to communicate. Are they really places where I can learn from others and develop deep understanding of my professional practice?

He sees discussions in the 2.0 communities becoming merely handbooks for how to use technology in the classroom, rather than the deeper conversations of reflective practitioners.

One could also argue, much like Steve Hargadon does, that these communities will help me gradually learn about all the tools that I may sooner or later decide to use. I think the question I should really be asking myself, however, is whether or not I need to use these tools and, if so, am I ready to implement this technology in my own classroom. Without a close engagement with my practice, without a close analysis of who I am as an educator, I am going to find it rather difficult to understand how this new tool can enrich my practice. I will also need to reflect on its presence once I start using it. Can a community of teachers help me accomplish that? Do they want to listen to my experiences and reflections? Are they interested in supporting my journey of professional development? Should I try to enlist their support? (Glogowski 2007)

Glogowski implies that the personal blog is an ideal place for monitoring our own practice, a space where we can reflect and redefine our teaching and learning.

“We need places that can support a culture of teacher-researchers where narrative inquiry is the backbone of our development as educators. We need spaces to create our own narratives because they are both phenomena that emerge from reflection and the method through which we reflect.”

I am intrigued by his argument as it resonates with all my previous understandings of the reflective practice. It is the process of reflection, when coupled with our experiences that move us forward into considering new opportunities for taking risks. It makes sense to me that professional growth can occur in this context, rather than by just following someone else’s latest update in a “container” online community.

What is new to me however, is the role of the blog in creating an educational space – a place where my experiences, my new learning and my reflections come together. This is a place that marks a path- pointing the way from where I have come, while pulling me forward into new possibilities in an expanded vision of my practice. And that is just the first layer! When other educators who have also embraced this process share their reflections and journeys, a powerful contextualized resource emerges that has the potential to transform the practises of its users.

It is this community therefore, that becomes the ultimate RSS. Beyond that fluorescent-lit, concrete-floored, elbow-jagging Costco world of the internet and the blogosphere, this is the personal shopper that finds me crying in the parking lot, brings me a quiet cup of tea and a kleenex, and loads my car with just the very items that I needed.




















References

http://landmark-project.com/rssnewsfeed/index.php

http://weblogg-ed.com/

http://www.educause.edu/eli

http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-and-education.htm

http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/2007/04/03/autobiographical-practices/