A little less linear and a lot more complicated, our Blogs, Wikis and RSS workshop explored these more interactive tools for online learning. Jim Sullivan’s blog is rich in links and information, and his All Things Californian group class blog is a great example of how the tool can be effectively used. A good place to start would be either Edublogs or the old standby Blogger, now owned by Google.
I presented wikis, which are collaborative, editable collections of web pages. Students in one of my classes last semester drafted their quizzes (password is history103) in a PBWiki. The current Technology Master Plan is being developed in a schtuff wiki. I linked to it using a button in Blackboard, and the external URL, which can be done with any web-based program you’d want to use.
David Megill introduced us to RSS feeds (explained the “Oprah way” at this page), which can be collected and presented to students for selecting articles and topics. I use My Yahoo, which I didn’t realize was technically an “RSS feed aggregator” to get the latest articles from the BBC, movie listings, weather, and postings from the few blogs I read. But the fun part is making pages of feeds like this available to students, which David does with not only text feeds but podcasts, using Feedburner and iTunes.
