Still in the progress of rethinking my online reading habits. About three weeks ago, I deleted every feed from my Google Reader and decided to start over, and I’ve been slowly adding feeds as I come across things of interest. But I’ve also been looking at different avenues to find the most interesting, most relevant stuff, and, most importantly, to shift my reading to include more diversity. Here are just some unsorted reflections and benchmarks so far.

• I’ve stopped subscribing to all but a handful of edublogs. For some time now it’s been feeling like there’s not much new in the conversation. I may be guilty of that as well, and I think that’s a product of my narrow scope of reading.
• My main source of reading right now is my Delicious network, which I am constantly revisiting. I’m thinking that for me at least, 50 people is about the right amount of flow. This is without question, however, not a very diverse group of folks in terms of read/write web worldview. It’s almost all info candy. I continue to find it really interesting, however, to see the types of reading themes that people dive into as it tells much about where a particular person’s thinking or research is at.
• I’m finding myself devoting more time to the “friend’s shared items” in my Google Reader, which is a good and bad thing. The bad is that the “friends” list is generated by who is in my Gmail contacts which means I can’t add or delete folks from this stream without some difficulty. The good, however, is that there is some diversity in there as some of my contacts actively read and share thinking that is outside of my box at least. It’s been a main part in pushing my thinking about the whole “21st Century Skills” label, about which my thinking has been evolvoing quite a bit. (Short answer: Not much new there, but the label has some value.)
• This post by Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web really has my thinking about filter creation a la Clay Shirky. There is something about this experimental phase that I really love, and I’ve been itching to figure out some different ways to identify, collect and sort the most relevant information out there. Not rocket science, and I’m sure others are farther down this road than I, but I’ve been hacking around with PostRank the last couple of days and waiting to see the results. I know that using a sorting feature to bring me only the most saved, commented upon, bookmarked posts from any blogs has it’s downsides, timeliness for one. But I’m playing with the choices.
• I’m also digging more deeply into the Google News search and subscribe features as well as the Twitter search stuff. For instance, you can do a search for any Tweets that have the word “literacy” and includes a link. Problem is, of course, that it doesn’t catch everything and much of what it does catch is irrelevant.
• I’m growing increasingly enamored withe Google Notebook as a way to capture the best snippets and ideas for a variety of purposes. More and more, I read with an ear for saving the most salient parts, which is really challenging me to think of my own organizational schemes in a good, but somewhat frustrating way.

So I’m asking for a couple of things, here. First, how do you create diversity in your reading? What strategies do you use and who are some authors that your read to get out of your own boxes? And second, what other ways of filtering information have you come across or do you use to increase your signal to noise ratio?

There is so much to read, and I want to read it all, but I know I can’t. What is most important to me right now is that my reading stretches me and pushes me, not just affirms what I think I already know. I feel bad on some level on giving up many of the blogs I’ve ready for many, many years now. But if I can tap into the strengths of the network and the best filters that are currently out there, I trust that the best thinking and writing from those long-followed sources will float up through my attention stream anyway.

(Photo “Research Team” by Dean Shareski.)

I hadn’t planned on getting my writing life in order today, but then I somehow happened on this post by Michele Martin on using Delicious to create an online portfolio. Since I have a couple of articles due out this fall (and a couple of new books in the works), I decided a good place to start getting my brain around the idea was with all of the off-blog writing I’ve done the past few years, and so, there went a couple of hours. After wading through it all, it turns out I was able to locate online 35 of the 40 or so pieces of published writing I’ve done (at least the ones I can remember.) Anyway, I gave them all a tag, and now when you pull up the associated page in Delicious, you can see them all in one quick swoop.

A couple of observations here: First, while I know there are parents who are choosing their kids names based on whether or not the domains are available, (which is ridiculuous, btw) I’m thinking it may be good to choose a tag early on. I’ve started using tessorichardson and tuckerarichardson for the stuff I post about my own kids, and I’m thinking they might continue to use that tag as they begin creating and posting their own stuff as well. Second, what I like about this is that because of the RSS feed, people who might be interested can track my work and I can repurpose it elsewhere, say on a Pageflakes page (which could also serve as a portfolio, btw.) Third, as Michele says, the easy to update part of this is really intruiging. For instance, I might want to do this whenever I read generous reviews of my book, (forget the bad ones…(0:) or when excerpts of my presentations end up online. Just create a bit of a different tag, like “willrichardsonbookreviews” or “willrichardsonpresentationclips” etc. And then, I could use the bundles function to bring them all together (or, of course, I could just add a catchall tag like “willrichardsonportfolio”.)

Dunno if this has any earth shattering significance, and I’m sure many folks are already playing with variations on this theme, but I think the ease of doing this once you have it set up makes it worth a second or third thought.

(Photo “Footprints” by andy 5322.)

A few disparate ideas and experiences funneling into this post…

Recently I heard Robert Garmston speak about the need to adapt in times of significant change. He wasn’t speaking specifically of schools but about any organization, and he made an interesting distinction between technical change (which is what most schools have been undertaking) and real, adaptive change. Adaptive change, he said means:

• The implementation of almost all new practices as opposed to simply extending past practices
• New organizational ways of working
• Challenging previously held values
• Requires gaining new knowledge and skills

And much of that work, he said, has to be taken on not by the “wise folks” at the top but by everyone, inquiring, re-thinking, re-envisioning within “professional communities learning” (nice twist on the phrase.)

I thought of all of that while reading “Rocks New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don’t Sell” which talks about how the music industry is adapting to the changes brought about by these new technologies. Here is the money quote that I think captures much of the dilemma surrounding all of this:

Cliff Burnstein, co-owner of the management firm QPrime — which represents Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as smaller acts like Silversun Pickups — says the old major-label model is fading fast. “That’s definitely over,” he says, noting that Silversun Pickups, on the indie label Dangerbird, have licensed several songs for TV and do well on the road. “Silversun Pickups make a decent living,” he says, but adds that he wonders whether most musicians can put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape — or if they even should. “It’s hard enough to write a decent song,” Burnstein says. “That’s still the talent I’m looking for.”

That article was referenced by Paul Krugman of all people in today’s Times in a thought-provoking column titled Bits, Bands and Books about how business models and, specifically, books are trying to figure out how to adapt. The most interesting part to me is the way he covers the building debate over free content and intellectual property.

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success. But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

Which brought home a recent visit I made to a storied, venerated, old private New England academy that is successful by any traditional measure despite a very different approach to learning, one that has resisted (and is still resisting) technology as a learning tool (and even as a teaching tool). They are seeing the change coming in their students now, the ways in which they interact outside of class, the videos they are producing, the debates over intellectual property. The connections the technologies facilitate are seeping into their classrooms, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it. Some interesting conversations have started.

So all of that has me reflecting once again on how we think about changing this education model we’re always talking about, about what needs to change, and about how it all plays out. Not just in terms of how we do our own education business, but in how we prepare our kids to live in a world where many of the models for making a living ain’t what they used to be. I still think these changes “start at home” so to speak, with our own personal understanding of them.

And, to rephrase a bit from above, I still wonder whether most educators can (or are willing) to put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape, though I am absolutely convinced they must.

(Photo Be the Change by danny.hammontree.)

Before I pull myself the last couple of steps up from my recent blogging funk, a quick item from the “Things I Wished I’d Known for the Last Two Years Department.” My major, major, major frustration with Google Reader has always been what I thought was the inability for me to mark a post “unread.” As with my practice in Firefox when I leave like 87 tabs open, by work flow is such that I just like to keep alive all the potentially good stuff I scan through when I don’t really have time to read it. The “Add a Star” feature in Reader has never done the job, and I have been staring at the stupid “Mark as Read” button (which I have never understood the purpose of) wishing I could turn it into “Mark as UNread.” No amount of staring helped.

So today, I find out all you have to do is hit the “M” key on a post to keep it active in Google Reader. I know, I know…I should have spent more time on the shortcuts page.

Not sure what it says that my life suddenly feels a whole bunch better right now. Sad, I know.

It’s the admissions part that’s sticky, but I have some. Over the past month or so, something really shifty has been going on in my own practice, changes that on some level are somewhat disconcerting.

First, my aggregator is dead! Long live the aggregator! This is the toughest shift to deal with: I have pretty much stopped reading my feeds. Here are the reasons I can articulate:

• Way too much travel of late…Australia, China, Canada, and my next two months are going to be brutal. I think my
• Brain is just fatigued, plain and simple. Which may be one reason I’m currently really
• Bored by the conversation. I’m still feeling like most of what little I am reading and writing is just a rehash of stuff we’ve been talking about for years now. It’s stale, which might be why I’ve been drawn to
• UStream. It’s fresh in one sense that in the process of learning it it feels like I’m actually getting somewhere. The gains are tangible. But the gains take me time (read: small left brain), time that I would normally spend reading deeply but instead now read
• Thinly, as in Twitter. I blame Twitter for a lot of this, actually. It’s a lot simpler, isn’t it? The lazy man’s blog tool. And while it’s great to have the network at my fingertips, it’s also a distraction in many ways.

Second, blogging is work these days. (Have you noticed?) It’s feeling more like shoveling the manure at Tess’s pony club…it’s got to be done, but there isn’t much joy in it. And I’ve got Tom Hoffman on my shoulder whenever I start typing, which isn’t a bad thing in that it raises the bar in my own brain but it also makes this more work than fun at times. (Not your fault, Tom. You’re just doing your job.) See many of the other reasons listed for my lack of feed reading as relevant here too.

Third, Skype (actually IM and chat in general) has become the major communication tool in my day right now, and I’m feeling almost constantly connected to a small portion of the network. It’s not unusual for me to have three or four chats going at the same time. Talk about a distraction. (This part, at least, was put in some perspective yesterday when Steve Dembo, in response to the latest Twitter outage, created a Skypechat room for all of his friends to continue the updates, all while in an important business meeting. Oy.)

Finally, the whole model for personal pd feels like it’s shifting. Yesterday was the birth of EPDN, the “EdBlogger Professional Development Network” (coming soon to a cable channel near you). For three hours last night, people were grazing from one live event to the next between the “K12 Online Fireside Chat” at 7 EST to my “Playing with UStream” episode on Weblogg-ed TV at 8 EST to “Women of the Web” interviewing David Jakes and Ewan McIntosh at EdTechTalk at 9 EST. There was a weird new feel that I got from all of that, one that on some levels was pretty cool but on another just felt like total overload (especially if you tried to follow any of the chat conversations…)

So anyway. That’s the state of my world. Just for the record. Today. At this moment.

Now if the Cubs had won the World Series…

Technorati Tags: learning, education, shifts

One of the metaphors I find myself moving more and more to of late is “Aggregator as Textbook.” Google Reader is the place (along with Twitter of late) that I head to first every day when I open up my computer, and on an average day, I end up going back there at least 4 or 5 times. It’s become an important part of my learning process, because my daily study almost always starts and flows from what’s collected there.

That being the case, I’ve been thinking more and more about my own use of RSS, and trying to reflect on the choices I make in my aggregator. Frankly, I am still amazed that so relatively few people (not just educators) have made RSS a part of their practice, but I wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with how disruptive a technology it is when you really think about it. It changes the traditional information structures in fundamental ways, and it forces us to be much more involved with the information we consume. I’m no longer just a reader; I’m an editor who is constantly at work in the process of finding feeds to read, determining what’s relevant, trying to connect ideas and patterns, making decisions as to what to do with all of the information I come across.

The technical side to RSS is not that difficult. But I constantly wonder if I’m “doing RSS well” in the way I use it. So, anyway, here are six things I wonder about my own use of what I think is the most powerful of all of these technologies.

What’s my optimum number of feeds to read? I’ve gone between 25 and 250, and now at about 60 I’m still not sure if that’s the “right” number. And it’s not just a time factor that determines that number, although that has more to do with it than anything else. The scope of topics and a diversity of views also has a lot to do with it.

How do I not become “married” to the feeds I already have? It would be easy to keep the 60 or so feeds that I have for a long time, but I’m not sure that’s the best strategy. As new voices appear, as my interests shift, I need to be willing to let some old voices go. That’s exceedingly hard, at times, because I don’t want to miss anything, and because I feel connected to those teachers on many levels.

Do I rely too much on a handful of feeds? I’ll admit, while I struggle reading every feed every day, there are a half dozen or so that I try not to miss. I think of these as the ones that do the best job of culling out the important ideas of the day. In many cases, these people are reading many of the same sources I am. I wonder if this makes it even more difficult to read more widely.

How many individual pieces of information can I realistically make sense of? There are days when I could easily find 50 or so interesting, relevant posts or links to sites, and I wonder if that’s always such a good thing. If I were to try to process all of that, will the best filter up?

How do I best organize the information that is most useful? I have a del.icio.us account, and I stow away some snippets of things in various spots. I tag and tag and tag. But this is my most difficult struggle. I’ve yet to find a really effective way of processing all the ideas and links that make it easy to return to later.

Should I read ideas, or should I read people? Stephen Downes advocates for the former, and I can understand why. It’s the concept, the exchange of ideas that is important, not the person so much. Still, I find it very difficult to separate the two, and I do think that knowing the person through the writing adds context to the ideas. But, again, reading people also tends to limit the scope and diversity of the ideas, I think.

Without question, my aggregated text requires much more intellectual sweat than the traditional form. And that’s actually why I want my own kids to become adept at writing their own texts around the topics they find engaging. I’ve put together Pageflakes pages for my kids built on RSS feeds about horses and the Phillies as a way to get them started. But that’s just the first step.

So, I wonder, what do you wonder about RSS?

Technorati Tags: rss, learning, education

This isn’t much different from doing it with SuprGlu (in fact it may not be as elegant) but since it’s the first use of a public Google Reader page to collect a classroom full of student blog posts that I’ve seen, here’s a link to it. The posts are from a 6th grade social studies class whose teacher Mike Hetherington is “mother blogging” here and offers up some pretty good “rules for blogging,” a wiki, and some podcasts (though nothing recent.)

Mike latest post on his blog is, I think, another great example of a teacher using a blog to build community among his student bloggers.

technorati tags:blogging, education, schools

Since we’re getting practical around here, I just wanted to share a Pageflakes page that I’ve been using in my RSS workshops to show how anyone can create topic specific portals with feeds. This page on Darfur/Sudan (not the most uplifting topic, I know…we have much to be thankful for) 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, well, blogs. 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 a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. Not everything that shows up here will necessarily be suitable for some ages. (I have, however, created a same page for my daughter Tess about horses that I let her read at her discretion…she’s nine.) From a student standpoint, I think it’s a great way to introduce RSS, to give kids some ownership over the type of page they create (assuming you’ve had all the responsible use conversations already) and let them start working out their own processes for consuming and deciding about content in this content rich world. And the good news is that they can keep these pages private, or they can share them with groups (or teachers) so they don’t have to be as transparent as this example.

Additionally, the Pageflakes folks have been creating some interesting edu-specific “flakes”

that teachers can use. See this page, for instance, that has among other things a grade tracker, message board, to do list, and contact list. Again, since the student has the ability to keep these portals private, there are all sorts of ways that we can start introducing RSS and content management types of skills.

Finally, let me just emphasize the idea that in this environment when we can start collecting information from so many different sources around the globe, it’s imperative that we be modeling ways to do that. Imagine the types of global newspapers you could build around relevant topics with something like this. If we continue to just get the US perspective, I think we’re wasting a huge opportunity to expand and challenge our thinking.

technorati tags:pageflakes, darfur, education, learning, reading

Via Blogs for Learning, a new site from Michigan State, comes this pretty interesting article “The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom” by David Parry from the University of Albany. It has a higher ed slant, but is very relevant to younger students as well. Some relevant quotes from the article:

• “One of the most significant concerns about using blogs in the classroom is that students often feel as if they are doing the same writing, just placing it on the web. Since context determines meaning, the method and message of writing necessarily changes as students compose for the internet; however, many academics fail to convey this information to students.”
• “If one simply transfers the “book-way” of writing onto the digital space, students have learned little that they could not have gained from more traditional writing assignments. The situation may even be worse than one of unnecessary reconfiguration, for in the digital medium, writing often produces technological frustrations which, if not offset by other gains, leads to negative experiences for the students. Since the context of writing has shifted in the digital, it is important to demonstrate to student how authorship itself has shifted in the age of the digital.”
• “To write “well” in this space students need to learn not only how to cite and link, but indeed to package their writings in a different way. RSS helps accomplish this goal.”
• “The speed of reading in the age of the digital has changed, and we need to help students navigate this…Reading on the internet requires two separate skills: one, the quick analysis to find what is worth reading, and the second, a switch to slow analysis to carefully consider what has been found. What RSS does is allow students to make this distinction, to receive content as “bits” easy to scan, and then to select what they want to read.”

I think it’s great to see some more pedagogy centered articles about RSS coming out.

technorati tags:rss, education, learning, blogging

I just want to take a moment to thank that cadre of del.icio.ers who have taken to adding links they might find useful into my “For Willrich” page. Some of you I know, but others I don’t, and I think it’s such an interesting example of Web goodness that I just wanted to acknowledge it. I, of course, have maybe saved three links “for” others. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a great idea. To be honest, I just keep forgetting I can do that. But whenever my RSS feed shows some new links from “strangers,” I get a warm fuzzy.

Especially when the links are things like Sir Ken Robinson and Dandelife and articles about shakeups in education. Combine that with the EduBlogger News page, and you have a couple more examples of the social interconnectedness of the Web these days.

Now, I just have to find enough time to getting back to contributing more…

technorati tags:rss, delicious, social, education

Spent an interesting few hours in Greenwood, SC today presenting to and talking with the faculty and the deans of Piedmont Technical College about the wonders of the Read/Write Web. I got a tour of some of the classrooms and a rundown of what they are doing with distance learning, and I have to say it was probably one of the most impressive technology buildouts I’ve seen. They have a number of rooms that have video uplinks with satellite campuses from throughout the region, and they are in the process of really ramping up their online course offerings in some major ways.

And now they are trying to turn their attention to the pedagogies that go along with all of that technology. And I’ve been trying to figure out a good way of showing the potential power of RSS and social bookmarking in an hour long presentation that could just as easily be three hours long with everything there is to show and talk about. I think today I actually came close to getting them to the power of the socail aspect of all these tools. In about five minutes, here’s what I did:

• Framed the whole RSS concept by telling them how I would subscribe to all of their blogs (assuming they all had one.
• Framed the whole social bookmarking piece by deconstructing my list of links in del.icio.us (including touching on the distinction between taxonomies and folksonomies.)
• Clicked on the plagiarism tag in my account (which was relevant because we’d been having a number of questions about IP, copyright, plagiarism, etc.)
• Clicked on the link to see what other people had saved the recent article from USA Today on “Authorship Gets Lost on the Web”
• Clicked on the link to the plagiarism folder for the user “Senioritis.”
  
• Talked about how, after reviewing the list of plagiarism links that Senioritis had saved and finding them to be pretty relevant and substantive, I could “subcribe” to all future links that Senioritis might save to his/her plagiarism folder.
• Talked about how if a could find 5-10 such “deliciousers” that it could be a powerful way of finding out new and useful information (and how finding 25-50 could be mind-numbing.)

Right there, in that small chunk, is where I think most people’s brains start to whir. Especially when you talk about it from the professional practice standpoint. And the questions were great. “Do those people know you are doing that?” “Can they take your stuff too?” “If other people are going to take it, why would you want to put your stuff up there?” “Do you credit those people with doing the research?” It felt like a good way to just encapsulate the way things are shifting.

technorati tags:delicious, education, rss, social

Alan’s great post about del.icio.us titled “Tagging It to the Next Level” has me thinking about how to better use it as a way of tracking the reading of the community. Since you can create your own network of users based on their account names, I’m thinking I could add to my network anyone who consistently saves links to relevant stuff and then offer up the RSS feed for the results. (The feed does not appear to be working right now, however.) It would also be good to know the account names of people in the community so we could use the for:xxxxxx (where the xs equal the account name, i.e. for:willrich) tag so we could send links to other people’s accounts.

If you’re game, leave your del.icio.us account name in a comment below. At the very least, it might help you set up your own networks…

technorati tags:del.icio.us, connective_reading, Alan_Levine

I love Bloglines, but this article in TechCrunch has me looking at the alternatives. One that I really want to like is Rojo, which has all sorts of social Web goodness built into it. I LOVE the fact that I can tag individual posts…kind of like a built in del.icio.us. Of course, every tag has it’s own rss feed, which creates all sorts of possibilities. And the recommendation feature a la digg is also very cool. But for some reason, Rojo doesn’t seem to update as consistently as Bloglines. And I have to remember to mark all of the posts read manually instead of just marking stuff I want to keep as with Bloglines. And finally, I guess I just really like the framed Bloglines page which doesn’t require a refresh every time I click on something. This is one of those “wish I had the best of both worlds” moments.

The other one I’ve been playing with is Gritwire which is AJAXalicious and therefore fun to play with. It has a wiki function built in as well as podcast support through the Grit Wire Media player (which is a pretty nifty little app.) But even with all of that, it’s just not as simple as Bloglines, somehow. Maybe it’s just old habits.

So, can anyone give me a reason to switch from Bloglines? Anyone using FeedLounge or Google Reader (which got the highest ratings in the TechCrunch article)?

Here’s an admission…I’m an RSS fraud. Hypocrite, if you must. And I apologize.

Yesterday, in three straight presentations about the wonders and potential of RSS to rock our eduworlds, I kept getting more and more embarrased at the fact that when I showed my Bloglines account, which has ballooned up to 197 feeds, it was obvious that while I might be subscribed, I’m not keeping up with my reading. In fact, if you totalled up the number of unread messages in my list, it’s a very audience appealing 3739. If that doesn’t motivate some people to dive right in, I don’t know what will.

Now understand that 2,347 of those are from Wes Freyer, the most prolific edublogger in the universe. (Really it’s “only” 57.) And the problem is that I hestitate to click the Wes link because I know it’s gonna take me at least an hour to read through all of the good stuff he’s blogging about. (Slow down, Wes. Please. I’m begging.)

This is why I had to quit my job…

Anyway, I made the people in attendance yesterday swear that they would take a time out if they ever got up to 20 feeds in their aggregators. Hopefully that will keep them from feeling like a total RSS failure if they should “get behind” in their reading.

From the “Churning Through my Overloaded Aggregator Department” comes this discussion over at D’Arcy Norman’s blog about the ways in which tagging and aggregating via “EduGlu” can start bringing all sorts of content together. Now I’m a little slow on the machinations of all of this, but the basic idea here (I think) is that we can give our students a unique tag for any interesting content they find that’s relevant to a course, get them to start collecting that content in their blogs, on Flickr, in del.icio.us and anywhere else where tagging is allowed, and then pump the RSS feeds for that tag from all of those sites into a SuprGlu type page to create quite the extensive “River of News.” (And even if that’s not what they’re talking about, it’s a pretty cool idea just by itself.)

Which reminds me, I gotta remember to tag these posts. Another reason to get off of Manila which doesn’t have a form field for it. So here:

Tags: RSS, Tags, SuperGlu