I want to introduce my journalism students to the concept of RSS and see what they do with it. The potential impact of RSS on reporting and news gathering is pretty huge, I think, especially for special interest journalists. Since I have my students keeping track of an individual beat, the addition of RSS feeds about their topics would greatly increase their exposure to and consumption of news in their areas. I think RSS has the potential to develop a lot of experts at an early age.

Now the difficulty is that Manila has no built in aggregator yet, and most all of the other aggregators out there require a download of some type. That’s not an easy task with student machines here. I can’t put Radio on every machine in my room. The only web based aggregator I’ve found doesn’t really suit my needs. If I could get NewsMonster on every machine…now that would truly be interesting. Kids could get content even from sites without RSS feeds. (It requires a new version of Netscape, too.) But what happens when classes change and I have new journalists sitting at those machines? It may be nothing more than changing the feeds, but it’s more thinking than I want to have to do.

Anyone know of any web-based aggregators that do a bit more than just update content into a long feed once a day?

Seems like I’m doing this more and more these days…hmmm.

James Farmer hits the ground running:

Having spent so much time thinking about & arguing for the use of blogs in eduction… figured it was about time I got myself one and started playing with the idea a bit more.

It’s interesting to watch someone else have all those eye-opening thoughts and “A Ha” moments that come with the newness of this…I’m sure it’s happening a lot more than we know.
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One of the best things about this technology is the possibilities it brings in terms of ways to bring different audiences together. Anne and I are starting our collaboration tomorrow. (Note: That page is a work in progress.) And as I’ve been getting e-mails from other teachers from all over the place, I’m thinking even bigger.

Our school has won all sorts of awards for Electric Soup which is a long time electronic magazine featuring creative writers from all over the world. The staff gets hundreds of submissions a year and then they publish the edition using some very high level design and graphics packages. It’s very impressive.

But it’s excellence doesn’t foster collaboration among a diverse student population. You need skills to produce that stuff. (I know I couldn’t design some of those pages!) It’s a beautiful application of Internet technology, but in some ways it represents many of the issues that Pat brings up when he’s talking about the “Digital Paper” that Web logs give everyone access to.

So, what about this…a long distance Web log journalism magazine? One that focuses on a different topic relevant to school kids each month. Writers collaborating from around the country, moving through as writers, then Content Editors etc. Collaborative groups working on through production and design issues, giving feedback, writing and editing together. Each of them with equal access to all of the digital paper they need.

Nothing earth-shatteringly new here. But realistic. That’s is THE BEST PART of what this tool offers…possibilities that were either too difficult or too cumbersome to pull off before just got a whole lot easier. I hate to sound overly dramatic about it, but this does change the landscape in so many ways, and now a lot of it is unexplored territory once again. Pretty cool.