I’ve been playing with Furl some more and having some minor epiphanies as I go. I’m almost at the point where I think there could be some broad implementation but I’m worried that since it’s in beta it might just go away some day. What I’m thinking of entails quite a bit of setup. When Mike Giles of Furl e-mailed posted this last week it got me thinking…

Glad to see you are finding Furl useful! If you want to give folks an email option, they can subscribe to your archive (and can subscribe to specific topics). That way, they will get a daily email with the new links from the day before. Click on the “Share” tab to read more about it. Also, folks can search your archive at any time (and it searches the full text of the articles/sites that you furled).

Ok, now this is pretty mind boggling to think about. On a small scale, here’s what I’m doing:
1. Set up my librarian with a Furl account. She’s going to play with her page of Art links.
2. Set up a couple of Furl departments that she can sort the sites she wants to add into.
3. Use the viewRssBox macro to display each of these department feeds under their respective categories on the Art Links page.
4. Let her go crazy.
Now this is a very cool solution for a number of reasons. First, it’s easy for her; she finds a page she likes, Furls it, and it shows up on the library links site with annotation. Second, we don’t have to worry about that quirky WYSIWYG Manila editor screwing things up. Third, well, it’s just cool.

But then I start thinking about this on a big scale. What if all the English teachers Furled as they worked into the same page with various departments. And then what if an e-mail went out to department members on a daily basis to keep them up with what’s new? (And just think too, they could just get e-mail about the Shakespeare department, or the composition department, or…) Better yet, what if we fed the stuff into a collective Bloglines account? The setup to do this is huge, and frankly I wonder if it’s worth it. But it sure is cool to think about. (I have no life, evidenced by the fact that I’m thinking about Furl instead of getting my wife a birthday present for tomorrow. Sad…)
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I’m doing a little informal classroom research that will attempt to apply the Anne method for building community through the class portal. For the next few days, I’m going to be focusing on pulling best practices from the kids’ sites into the class homepage, as I did today. I’m also going to start urging them to read and write more about each other’s experiences. Many of them have been doing a great job of recording their process and making notes, but it still seems pretty individualized. I want them to start feeling like more of a team. (Note: This may just be an aftereffect from seeing “Miracle” on Monday.) Anyway, I’m going to see if I can’t get them interacting online a bit more. (Another note: As I’ve said before, this would be a lot easier, I think, if they didn’t see each other every day. Still, I think there are some students in my class who would rather write about their frustrations than talk about them.)

On another note, the research via RSS experiment is working pretty well. Claire, who is doing a story on what effects the legalization of gay marriage might have on school sex ed curricula, is getting some great stories fed right to her from Google News. Others are reporting the same. It appears to make a difference when the reserach comes to you as opposed to having to find it. I’m thinking this will be a standard feature of my journalism student Weblogs from this point on. Now if I could just get some teachers interested in this feature…
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