Very informative. And, I follow directions well, so I am commenting and leaving a link It would be presumptuous from me to assume that you may find my blog interesting, but I’ll do it nevertheless. It is in its infancy, so don’t judge too harshly.

Best,
e

Write the post myself?
Would I? Yes.
Could I? I am not sure. After the recent converse, I don’t think I am competent enough at using RSS and the like yet. I have only been blogging for 4 months. However, rather than wait in anticipation for you to write a post that I can then nit pick at, could we take a collegiate approach? Danger Mouse and Penfold (Not to mention metaphors again!)

This is a great conversation -and really helpful.

What learners need is a pathway through the information, until they have the skills to evaluate the difference between necessary, useful and nice to add on.

Regarding RSS, I have to confess that I followed Ewan’s enthusiastic instructions on using RSS recently, set up an account on Bloglines and then…couldn’t quite get the point of it. I don’t go back to it regularly, but trawl round the blogs I like.

Sorry to be dense, but what exactly are the advantages?

I’m not especially interested in HOW it works technically. As Tess said, some of us need metaphors. I want to know where it comes in the great scheme of things. At the moment -metaphor coming up- RSS is that expensive answering machine I got because my brother says he can’t live without it. I don’t use it very often, and often ponder the question of what on earth he does with it.

Do you make bloglines your homepage or what? Do you get it to email you if its updated and so on?

Go on. You really can’t make it too simple. Believe me!

Sorry can I add a forward slash to Metaphors?

Metaphors/similes

Great converse starting. I hope I haven’t opened a ‘Can of worms’ for you here.

I would firstly like to modify my earlier comment due to my great haste in typing.

‘Links mean nothing to newcomers’

Of course links are useful to newcomers. Indeed, they lie at the very heart of blogging. But, in context, a link takes you to a great wealth of text information, where usually only a paragraph or a sentence in the page is actually relevant to the point being illustrated. Rather like report writing, it can be time consuming skim reading text to find the information you want. I am a great fan of a simple quote from a page and, obviously, an acknowledging link. I know a few of my friends/colleagues that would read a blog but, for them, to sift through links is just far to time consuming. I would also like to point out that blogging is something that no teacher has time to do during the school day. I hope I am not wrong in assuming that we all blog through choice during our own personal time, respectively enhancing our profession?

I think your recent posts on blogging have been excellent. Indeed, I wrote a post referring people to you. If you have the time and passion, I think further posts relating blogging and the ‘technical’ stuff will be well received. I for one will continue referring people to your site. You are very good at explaining concepts. I am aware that what I am typing about is something that you are already very good at doing. For your posts to be worth while and cover all levels of understanding in ICT you might want to think more closely about the following:

(For the purpose of illustrating my point, I will use the ‘blog’ as the subject.)

Descriptions and methods
‘A Blog is…… Quote…..link…..quote..link. If you click on the links below, you can see some examples of great blogs’
Use of Metaphors
‘Using a blog can do…………….. A bit like………….)’
Screenshots, Screenshots, Screenshots!!!!!!!!
There is nothing better than seeing a screenshot of what you are meant to be looking at. Much better than trying to create a vision.

All of the above must be very basic. I mean exceptionally basic. The learning curves that occur in ICT literacy are just immense. Personally, there is nothing more satisfying that learning how to create and develop something new on my PC. A kind of delayed gratification with a positive reinforcement.

I am all for encouraging people to keep a blog. If pro bloggers find your posts too basic, they may not read them. So what! I say. I, for one, am certain that they would credit you for the encouragement you could provide in networking.

Just a few thoughts before the weekend

I’m not quite sure what you are all looking for. If you want to know how to use feeds, I feel like I said it all in the previous post – blogs produce lists of recent posts (and comments) in a format that can be interpreted by software. These lists are called feeds. You can subscribe to these lists with software called feed readers, or aggregators, so that you see any new posts from one page instead of having to trawl around all the blogs you like. That’s it basically

I’m not trying to avoid writing the post – I would just like a bit of advice before I start.

If you want to know the technical details of feeds – RSS, ATOM etc and how they actually work – we’d need to start with HTML, then XML, then talk about Web servers, then get a basic understanding of how a Web application works. Then we would maybe be ready to look in detail at how an RSS feed gets produced by a blog and interpreted by a feed reader. I can certainly explain all this stuff, but I’m not sure you average blogger, let alone “beginning blogger”, would be interested!