Today's Reading

Today I read three articles which were about Blogs, Wikis, RSS Feeds and how they can be used in education
The articles I read were incredibly interesting and reading them really made me feel excited about what can actually be achieved with these new technologies.

Today I finally learned what RSS (Rich Site Summary/Real Simple Syndication) is! I have been intrigued by the links to RSS feeds I have seen on websites but I've never gotten around to actually researching them. What they do is if you subscribe to a feed you get a message whenever new content is added to that feed! In my project that will mean that I (the teacher) can subscribe to the RSS feeds of each pupils' blog and I will get a message whenever they make a change (cutting down on the time spent reviewing pupils work as I will know who has made changes and when etc.) 


In two of the article I read the young people of today were described as "Digital Natives" and the "Nintendo Generation", both of which are very good descriptions of many (not all) young people today. Another label for the young people of today was in the title of one of the articles "the YouTube Google-Eyed Generation", an interesting synopsis...


A learning theory I encountered today was "Connectivism" which sounds very interesting and I hope to read more about it during my research. "Folio Thinking" is also a concept I want to look into.


As seems to be the case with this topic there was buzz word after buzz word used, including: Web 2.0, Wikinomics, Tikiwiki (Who came up with these???)