Thing 3 - Online Communication

As faculty, I can't access the Student Portal, but it seems to be a big upgrade from the previous OLS business.

Kudos Ai.

RSS business

So I'm revisiting RSS feeds and while I've used them sparingly in the past, I'm giving it another go.

While I can see the usefulness of using RSS to sift through the clutter and focus in on only the content you want to consume regularly, sometimes I'd rather go to the site. Call me old fashioned. And what about all that ad revenue these sites lose out on if all their users are using RSS to read the content. How's that affect their business model?

So I signed up for some blogs and news sites using Apple Mail as my reader, as I'm constantly in there anyway, though I also set up a bloglines account as well as the advantage of that is that its web-based and I needn't be on my computer. Again, some of this seems a little unnecessarily overwhelming (perhaps I'm old, but I'm not that old, am I). For example in trying to learn about the features in bloglines I come across the following: "

Clip Blogs are a new feature that lets you easily create a blog within Bloglines, and it is the only place on the web where you'll find blog creation and sharing capabilities fully integrated with blog search and blog reading. Now everything you find in Bloglines is blog-able!"

I lost interest at "blog".

But, the biggest advantage of RSS as I see it and where it may be useful for me as an instructor

is in the way students can receive the most recent info automatically, without having to check

their email or log in to anything else, and I only need to publish a post for it to go to all, which

could be groovy.

We'll see.

Thus begins my 16 things...

So far, so good.