rss feeds

I had a  conversation with Lisa Featherstone of JISC TechDis recently about RSS feeds and podcasts and the fact that although those of us who know about them and use them think the technology is the bees' knees, chances are your neighbour on the street doesn't understand it. They don't know how it can enrich their lives. How did we get to the point where the RSS logo is everywhere, but so few people use the technology? We didn't have that problem with email, did we?
Maybe it's to do with RSS readers. Browsers are a way into the web, we all know that, but even then, most people don't know their Firefoxes from their Googles (What's the difference? Isn't it all just Google?). They might double-click on IE to go to Google but to them, they've just gone to Google. The fact that there are different browsers is confusing. So adding RSS readers into the mix is just asking for trouble.

Then there's the whole debate about where RSS is going. Some of the big names are starting to share less : bit.ly/QcmKIT which is a worrying trend. When I was in a training session recently, teaching the teachers how to use RSS to grab content into Moodle, they loved the idea, and could also see how useful it would be in their daily lives.

So, talking about how useful RSS is, if you don't currently subscribe to James Clay's elearning stuff podcasts, why not? An example episode here starring myself and Dave Sugden: podcast #080

Desire lines

I've just been researching the concept of 'desire lines'. I was trying to find the metaphor for the way we shoehorn our learners or teachers to use the institutional systems and then complain when the uptake is low. This picture illustrates the problem so well:

cc image by Alan Stanton http://flic.kr/p/bNU5cF

We have the paths that our learners and teachers are making on the internet: using Facebook, Twitter (maybe), YouTube, SMS, WhatsApp etc and usually via a mobile device. And then we have the vle, which is the equivalent of the concrete path that is laid down at right angles to how we want to 'walk' through resources, how we want to communicate, how we want to access the areas that most interest us.

How can we find a happy medium? A blog post by Steven Bradley (http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/desire-lines/) gives us some technical ways to figure out some of this by tracking what people search for, click on and the paths taken by them through your site. But I think, by then it's too late - you'll already have adopted the most popular open-source or commercial SYSTEM and you're trying to bend backwards to make it do what you want (Ring any bells, those of you who worked with me on a recent project?). At least I hope you bother to try to find out what people want to do on your site.

He also shares with us how Twitter grew and developed as a result of what people wanted: Twitter users developed the hashtag, the @replies,  retweets and so on. Interesting read!

So is there a solution to our 'How do we increase the uptake of our vle' problem? You've got to start with something and then maybe use an Agile approach to developing it. (I will have to discuss Agile in another post!). Are the current systems we use flexible enough? Are we interested enough to try to flex them? Or are we just going to install it, choose the prettiest theme and demand that people use the paths laid down by default?

For those who run out-of-the-box solutions, how much of the original problem has been solved and how many new ones have taken their place? Vles have been around for a decade now, and we're still trying to 'increase its uptake by staff and students'.  People, are we asking the right questions????

Lots of food for thought. A red rag to our bull (@JamesClay) on the VLE is dead theme ;-)

RSS, podcasts and Joe Bloggs

If you don't currently subscribe to James Clay's elearning stuff podcasts, why not? Latest episode here starring myself and Dave Sugden: podcast #080