As I’m struggling with this laptop upgrade problem, it has reminded me of one important lesson. Blogging isn’t only about writing. It’s about reading as well. I’m reminded of this because my aggregator is only partially populated with subscriptions. As a result, I’m missing some of the more inspirational choices I normally pull from for these daily posts. Will Richardson over at Weblogg-ed talked about this a lot awhile back and it’s very true.
On one hand, I’ve been thinking I need to prune back some of the 500 subscriptions I normally have. That’s a lot of noise and many people do go thru a build and purge cycle with their ‘gators. Perhaps it’s time for my list to be cut down.
On the other hand, I usually group them by subject and “read-level” so that those blogs that are “must read” are at the top of a subject (like Education) and those that are “if I have time” are near the bottom. Carrying the extras doesn’t really hurt me because I’m pretty ruthless about “mark as read” and moving on. Having all that extra stuff to use means that I have a wider choice of material from which to pick when it comes time to write.
Something tells me that by the time I get this list rebuilt, it’s not going to be a lot shorter.
September 27th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I would like to have more feeds that are educational related (that I can use and learn from) for my own personal use. Not that I’m not learning right now…just would like to read more blogs about teaching strategies, etc. Would I need to use a search engine to find feeds (educational blogs)? This is my first experience with feeds/ gators. I appreaciate your suggestions.
September 27th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I agree with Diana. I’m not really sure what feeds would be the best to have.
September 27th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
The problem is that every blog can be educational, so you have to pick and choose.
The best strategy is to follow a few and when they reference somebody, go look and see what they’re talking about.
Some education related blogs you might not be aware of.
Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed : http://www.weblogg-ed.com/xml/rss.xml
Alan Levine’s CogDogBlog : http://cogdogblog.com/feed/
Brian Lamb’s Abject Learning : http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/weblogs/brian/index.rdf
Susan Smith-Nash’s E-learning Queen: http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/rss/elearnqueen.xml
Alec Couros’s Couros Blog : http://educationaltechnology.ca/couros/wp-rdf.php
Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s 21st Century Learning : http://feeds.feedburner.com/21stCenturyCollaborative
Jeff Utecht’s Thinking Stick : http://www.thethinkingstick.com/?feed=rss2
Wes Freyer Moving at the Speed of Creativity : http://www.speedofcreativity.org/feed/
Clay Burell’s Beyond School : http://feeds.feedburner.com/cburell
There’s dozens more, but subscribe to the people that these folks reference and you’ll build a good basis.
September 27th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Yes, they’re all educational to some extent. Beyond this course, I would like to know how to continue using them to support my field of study. This will help… sounds great! Thanks again for the additional blog links!
September 27th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
I know how overwhelmed I get when I don’t read the subscriptions that I have…so I can only imagine what your gator looks like. I just need to find a better way to organize the subscriptions I have.
September 28th, 2008 at 1:19 am
I think organizing the gator is a good idea. I am just building my gator up right now and don’t have the problem you have. I do find myself having time to read more sometimes, and wished I had the EXTRA material available. Hopefully I will soon have a good foundation of ed. blogs.