Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Another reason to really love RSS

Andy Carvin, who works for NPR, posted "The Cutest Panda Video Ever" on his "Waste of Bandwidth" blog. That in turn led me to "The Chengdu Diary" blog that some of the folks at NPR are writing as they prepare for a program from China.

Andy, you are my hero!

:-)

Monday, April 21, 2008

RSS Revisited

I love my RSS feeds. You can learn so much stuff quickly just by glancing at the little synopses that are listed under the headlines. If I see something that looks interesting but don't have time to really look at it then, I can either mark it to keep it new so it doesn't disappear on me, or else I can email it to myself to look at it later. I've got a nice little folder in Outlook to file those emails, and I periodically take a moment or so to check them out.

Like today, for example. I took a little time to look through the folder, and found a reference to Time.com's First Annual Blog Index. It lists
25 of what it considers to be the top blogs in the blogosphere - quite a range of different topics, too! People are SO creative with their blog names sometimes..."The Velveteen Rabbi," "Freakonomics," "Web 2.Oh...Really?" You have to love it! Now, I haven't read most of these blogs, but I do intend to check at least some of them out!

Maybe I'll go do that right now.




Friday, April 11, 2008

Clean-Up Day

It's Clean-Up Day here at work; we do this periodically to get things in order, and this being the last day before spring break we figured it would be a bit slower than usual. It is, but only a little.

In any event, my office is really not in very bad shape; I have a small pile of things to sort, but that won't take long. The computer lab is in more need of work, so I'll go there presently to join Cheryl & Lisa who are cleaning the keyboards & monitors.

But first, I need to do a little mental housecleaning. I've been reading Doug Johnson's postings on "Changing How We Teach Copyright," which was very timely in view of the fact that I actually taught a class on copyright & intellectual property earlier this week. He has some great resources on this, and he really has me re-thinking how I should approach the subject in class.

The whole copyright thing gives me a headache, as I'm sure it does many other people. I'm not a copyright attorney; I don't know every legal ramification of every action (is there someone who does?), but the folks who come to my classes want clear answers of what they can and can't do. The best I can do for them is to refer them to Hall Davidson's chart on techLEARNING.com, which seems to please them, but there are so many grey areas in the whole issue that I still feel like I'm letting them down somehow.

There are SO many resources out there that I really need to organize them in some coherent manner. Maybe that's the kind of cleaning I should be doing today!