Category Archives: blogging

easy ways to read internet news and blogs

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Patrick and I were talking yesterday about the “types” of people who want to read news and blogs on the internet. Nearly everyone uses the web to go out and read articles, so even if they don’t know it they are gathering feed-based information. This most basic method of information hunting-and-gathering is just fine, but there might be another way that fits your personal work patterns better.

Here is the breakdown as I see it. People will tend to do one or more of the following:

  1. go out to multiple websites each day and read articles, columns, journals, and news on their own “home pages”
  2. use a web-based service (Bloglines, Google Reader) to collect, or aggregate, the information on a single web page
  3. use a program (like Thunderbird) to collect articles from favorite news sources and treat them like e-mail

I personally like getting my news alongside my e-mail using Mozilla Thunderbird. I check my e-mail quite frequently and tend to fall behind on reading my favorite websites. By getting a message every time a new article is posted, I can keep up with things better. This is solely a factor of the way I like to work, not a choice based on efficiency or “correctness.” 

We at IT expect other people feel the same way, so I’ve prepared a quick guide for any Thunderbird user who might want to try out gathering feeds in this way. Let me know if it helps!

picking the right web tool for the job

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Choosing to use a technology tool in a class can lead one down a difficult road. One important key is to figure out what tool to use for the job at hand. So do you use discussion groups, a digital movie project, a wiki, or a blog? To analogize, I wouldn’t want to use a belt sander to grout my bathroom tile, so it would be nice to better understand the nature of these different tools.

So how does one decide what tool or is the best for a specific application or need?

 I’ve found a couple of helpful guides to better understand blogs and wikis in the context of teaching and active learning:

campus blogs, integration, support, all that jazz.

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I’m posting this using the campus implementation of WordPress even though I don’t want to. I’d rather post this using the latest version of WordPress with all the plugins I’ve come to use with my other blogs. The trouble is that WordPress on our campus as currently conceived is more work than our support people are able to deal with in a timely manner. Too many projects clearly and correctly rank higher for our network team than upgrading or patching something that isn’t fully supported anyway.

It is quite nice that WordPress MU allows for integration with an LDAP server. This means that for this blog I can use the same username and password that I use for a number of other campus services. However it does not integrate into our campus website nor does our campus portal let WordPress or RSS feeds “plug in” for a user.

So what is the bottom line? Is blogging at Illinois Wesleyan viable? Sure, but it isn’t bulletproof. We have turned the corner and are engaged in regular discussions about what technologies we need to include in a standard “tool set” for faculty. A few faculty have included blog software in their courses, as a means to facilitate out of class discussion. In my opinion we first need a strong commitment to a technology from the faculty body (the summer workshop sponsored by the Mellon Center was a great start) and then we can find the resources to make it happen.

why would faculty want to blog?

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A number of us just completed a 2-day workshop on technology for a select group of faculty here at Illinois Wesleyan. Naturally 2 days is not enough time to even establish the foundations of enhancing teaching and learning with updated communication and research techniques. We had to blast through a lot of topics and examples of a few of the more ubiquitous tools in quite a hurry. I’m afraid that in the rush we might not have expressed why certain types of technology might be attractive to an already busy faculty member. Here are a few thoughts about what might “seduce” a teacher into authoring a blog:

  • at its most basic, blogging is about self-publishing. Anyone with opinions, expertise, or criticisms can simply post to a blog to share it with the world. This sounds a heck of a lot easier (for the casual bits of work) than submitting papers and writing journal articles. A group of undergraduates who tackle heavy scholarly work in a blog could take pride in that work standing up to scrutiny in an extremely public forum.
  • Most of the work is done for you. Barbara Ganley referred to a blog as a “vessel” for your content. You don’t have to design a webpage, learn code, or understand how the internet works. You write, you click “publish” and your work is out there. It is automatically archived by date and by categories that you provide.
  • Our mission statement says “A liberal education at Illinois Wesleyan fosters creativity, critical thinking, effective communication, strength of character and a spirit of inquiry”. I believe that our faculty will benefit from investigating new means of communication simply by expanding their perspective. I suspect that it is with strength of character and a spirit of inquiry that a teacher must adapt, improve, and learn.