I certainly feel that taking this class is "creating an avalanche of information that feels absolutely overhwelming". I am excited that RSS can help me to manage that information. I really like the idea of the content coming to you as opposed to you having to seek it out.
I do agree that our students need to learn how to evaluate material for relevance and importance. We've had the mad highlighting disease discussion. We do need to teach them how to "manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultanous information".
The ability to use RSS to let you know when something's been published with your keywords seems really valuable. I appreciate the explicit instructions to have an orgizational scheme by creating folders, and to make a habit of checking the aggregator daily. I like how you can tag your posts with keywords, or star them to save for later.
The most amazing part, I think, is Google gears, which allows tyou to save your texts for later reading even offline! Then, when you're connected, all of your actions are updated!
I have to be honest though, first thing's first. I think that I would have to have my students blogging before I would really find RSS useful. Personally, I don't check any news sites or blogs on a daily basis, so I don't see a need for it in my everyday use of the internet. I may subscribe to Word of the day, however. That seems like something I would find interesting.
I do like the idea of using the Yahoo reader to limit the language of the news so that I could get some great articles in the target language written by native speakers. That way, I could scan for articles that would be meaningful to and linguistically appropriate for my students. I think I just found my way to get started with RSS.
I think the RSS is really cool, but I am just getting to it now and I have over 77 to read!!! Oh no, not another thing to check! It is really helpful though, I will just need to check it more often. I have been reading all of your posts off of my feed right now.
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