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Concetta Gotlieb's blog

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Wednesday Jul 29, 2009

SDD follow-up & my thoughts on aggregating all our excellent content

Yesterday's PD session was great.  I love the little Captivate thing I did - I really want to finish it.  I wonder if they will end up on the website?

Today I spent a little bit of time thinking about something that has been on my mind for a while - email vs RSS.  I think for the centre we need the following:

  • The option to subscribe to 'everything macict' posted on the web via email or rss.  Particularly for reporting etc this would be useful.
  • The option to subscribe to 'important macict' stuff posted on the web via email or rss.  This is useful for helping teachers and staff understand and help each other in their projects.

I found what I think is an excellent solution:

  • MailChimp - will automatically send an email with your content in it to a distribution list.
  • Chimp Feeder - will mash-up lots of different content from the web and create a single rss

The benefits include a 1 time set-up process, stats on emails, legislative stuff like unsubscribe - all for free.  The disadvantage is that you can add text to the email so you would need to either send a seperate 'news - newsletter' or write a blog post and post that at just the right time so that it would appear as the first item in the email.

Also a few points to think about in terms of our use of online tools for professional development:

  • Me.edu.au is designed to have only your content & RSS feeds - not content from all over the web - this makes it easier for people who are interested in you to see exactly what you're up to.
  • Do we need to aggregate all the content that is being tagged by MacICT people from all places eg wikis, blogs, social bookmarks etc?  Do we need to be able to subscribe to a 'tag' for the projects individual or more for types of content eg wiki, blogs, social bookmarks???
  • How can we denote the urgency and importance of certain dates, blog posts, resources??  A different tag - aggregated in a different way.

Tags: communications me.edu.au rss sociallearning macict aggregation
Posted at 05:32PM Jul 29, 2009 by Concetta Gotlieb  |  Comments[4]

Comments:

Concetta, I like your ideas but to really understand all the implications I believe I need to be shown how it all works...sorry but I am so slow at picking up all the new technologies and using them. Be patient! :)

Posted by Karen Blackwell on July 30, 2009 at 04:18 PM CST #

Absolutely this is just a point for starting discussions. It's really interesting because this technology has only become really easy to use in the past few months. Also did you tick the box to recieve updates? Did you see this comment? Ta, Chet

Posted by Concetta on July 31, 2009 at 02:47 PM CST #

I think the idea of being able to subscribe to everything produced by a body of users quickly and easily. Currently there isn't anyway to do that in me.edu.au, but the idea of groups of users is something we see as important. I think the closest match currently is FriendFeed groups. They allow you to add RSS feeds to a shared group (eg, here is educause 09: http://friendfeed.com/edaust09), and you can also do things like email a group to have the email posted (which could be made to work for mailing lists)

Posted by Nick Lothian on August 05, 2009 at 09:18 AM CST #

Thanks Nick. Will investigate using friendfeed.

Posted by Concetta on August 21, 2009 at 07:51 AM CST #

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Concetta Gotlieb


I'm interested in: * Student created learning * New media * Social learning * Global connections Working for Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre I...
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