The Value of Reading Blogs
In the previous post, I talked about how we can write blogs as a form of professional development. But reading blogs can be just as meaningful. Blogs give us more up-to-the-minute access to information and commentary.
I was thinking about this on Sunday night, when the legislature of the State of Michigan, where I live, was working frantically to reach a budget compromise that would stop the state from shutting down services at midnight (the start of the new fiscal year). I wasn’t in Lansing, but I was able to keep up with the latest because the newspapers kept adding new content every 90 minutes or so.
The television news stations didn’t update me until the 11pm news, just one hour before the deadline. Timeliness is another important factor of Web 2.0 .
RSS Feeds Make It Easy
But how do you keep track of all the blogs that interest you? Sure, you could go out and visit every URL, hoping you’d find something new. And in the meantime, earnest bloggers like me would be creating content, just hoping you’d happen to remember to stop by.
But RSS feeds make this so much easier. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. A great way of explaining RSS is to think about magazine subscriptions. Sure, you can go to the newsstand every day, hoping that today is the day that the new People magazine is available. About six days a week, you’d be disappointed, but on the seventh day — BINGO!
Or, you could buy a mail subscription to People magazine. No more wasted trips to the newsstand. You have the confidence of knowing that People will arrive in your mailbox every week, and when you’re ready for something to read, just open the mailbox and get it out.
RSS is like a magazine subscription. Think of a blog as the newsstand. Instead of going to the newsstand every day, you use a service like Bloglines or Google Reader. You create an account and tell it which blogs you’d like to keep track of. And it’s free!
Behind the scenes, blogs send out special RSS code that can be captured by Bloglines or Google Reader. Each time you log in, your RSS reader goes out and lets you know if there’s anything new at any of your blogs. So your RSS reader acts like the mailbox. You open it when you want and explore what’s there. With RSS readers, you get one-stop shopping when you want to read it.
RSS can also help to declutter the in-box of your email account. For example, I got the New York Times via email each day and had to skip past it to get to my email. All day, it stuck out like a sore thumb in my inbox. Now, I get the New York Times via my Bloglines account, which I don’t visit unless I’m in the mood to skim headlines or read articles. Much better.
Does RSS still seem confusing? It sure sounds more complicated than it is. The best way of describing RSS that I’ve ever seen is Common Craft’s delightfully low-tech videos. Check out their RSS explanation here.
And don’t worry — the major blogging sites have RSS feeds for their blogs built-in, so when you are creating your blog, there’s nothing extra you need to do to set it up.
The days of cumbersome technology are gone — let technology do the heavy lifting for you.
Reading Strategies for Blogs (In Other Words: Skim, Don’t Read)
I know that when we school library media specialists received our master’s degrees in library science, we probably took a mental oath pledging to be great in-depth readers. But I’ll be honest. I don’t always read blogs. Sometimes, I scan the headlines or skim the first few paragraphs.
Good bloggers have eye-catching headlines that inform the reader of the subject or content of a blog posting. If I see that five blogs are reporting on Google’s latest announcement, I probably won’t read five full articles, but I’ll skim the first few paragraphs of each.
I often go through Bloglines and just look at the headlines that have come in since my last visit (a great thing to do when you’re stuck on the phone with an unwanted chatty caller … not that this ever happens). If a headline looks interesting, I click the box to save it for later reading. If it doesn’t look interesting or relevant, I pass it by. (For example, I love the RSS feed from the New York Times Arts Section, because I love to read about movies, books, opera, and theatre, but I’m less interested in modern art exhibitions. So I tend to save the opera reviews and dump the modern art ones, with all apologies to modern artists.)
As school library media specialists, we don’t have to know everything about everything (please, no know-it-all jokes). But knowing trends comes in awfully handy. What are the latest buzzwords? NCLB reform? SKILLS Act? iPhone? AASL Learning Standards? What are the folks “in the know” talking about that I should know about? What new Web sites are school library media specialists using to teach about frogs? What grants are available that could help me get new podcasting equipment? What showed up in the New York Times technology columns that a collaborating teacher is likely to bring up in conversation? When I track the headlines in the ASCD blog, which publishes Educational Leadership, I get a snapshot of the articles and content my administrators are reading, and that helps me tailor the language I use to describe my program to fit in with the trends they’re seeing.
A few minutes spent scanning blogs can do a lot to keep you in-the-know. Experiment with setting up an RSS aggregator (fancy word for RSS reader) account. You can add or delete blogs at any time. Try to get a variety of blogs — news, arts, education, technologies, school libraries, and more. (I admit it … when I moved and stopped getting cable TV, I subscribed to a Project Runway blog so I could keep up with the episodes I had missed. Don’t laugh — you can make a lot of friends in the teacher’s lounge if you keep up with reality TV. Not everyone thinks that MARC records make for scintillating lunchtime conversation.)
Join the Conversation
OK … step right up. I’ve told you about some of my favorite blogs. How about your favorites? Or do you have a blog you’d like to show off? We’d love to see it.
Image: Flickr
