Tuesday, October 02, 2007

eLearning Insider available via RSS

With the new Guild website you will find the RSS feed for the eLearning Insider

Learning2.0 and the Web2.0 tools that support it are for YOU, the instructional designer, as well.  While its great that you might implement blogs, wikis, and RSS for your school, company, or organization, its even more important that you start using these tools yourself as personal development tools.  Its up to YOU to investigate changing your daily habits and workflow.  How can we expect those that we support to embrace the new tools if we don't use them ourselves?

It is truly a shift in how we manage the flow of information in our lives.  This does not mean that you must start blogging in order to make this shift.  The biggest thing you can do without feeling like you are exposing yourself to the world is aggregating RSS feeds in a feed reader:  bloglines.com, reader.google.com, netvibes.com, pageflakes.com, etc.

You will truly be amazed and how well informed you will feel after making this part of your daily information scan.  Its like scanning the headlines of your local newspaper as a matter of habit each morning because you enjoy being informed and can handle idle conversation while conducting business.   This is like putting that habit on steroids.   Not only can you scan the content from your local paper but you can scan other sources of information related to your interests.  It seems like every media outlet from the smallest local rag to the largest cable channel has a feed you can subscribe too.

So, the flip side of this is the overwhelming amount of information you will have readily at your finger tips.  Consuming it all requires new forms of organization and scanning.  One simple solution is to scan aggragations that have been created for you like http://www.pageflakes.com/trainingblogs.   

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cool. I'd much rather read it in an RSS feed than in an email. Now that I'm used to using my reader, it just seems easier to process information there.

I notice that the posts in the feed are the full email all in one post. It seems like this would be a work well broken up into smaller sections. Office Watch does this for their newsletter. In email, it's one long message, but in the RSS feed, each section is a separate post. I have no idea how much hassle that would be, but it might be worth seeing how people want it. I do notice that, at least for myself, I'm much more likely to read through multiple smaller posts than one long one.

bschlenker said...

Hi Christy,
I agree. I like short blasts instead as well. This is great feedback. Right now we are in transition mode with the new web site and as you can imagine that is a HUGE project. So, I think the entire newsletter in RSS feed is a good short term transitional solution. As all of us begin to adapt to the new paradigm of publishing, I'm certain these will be available as a whole or in parts selectable by the user.
Thanks for the feedback.
Cheers!