Week 3 - Growing my PLE with an RSS

This week, we learned about the effectiveness of RSS in expanding our PLE as students and lifelong learners. Before this session, I had always seen the little orange half-diamond with white lines across them, but I had never taken the time to learn what it was, as I just assumed that it would be too complicated and would take too much time to learn. After this session, however, I've discovered that RSS can actually save you time spent doing manual online surfing and searching, so I found myself wondering why I didn't give this tool a shot earlier, as efficiency is one of my main goals as a learner.

(http://www2.macleans.ca/rss-feeds/) 

According to Rowse (2010), RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Rowse's article about RSS (http://www.problogger.net/what-is-rss/), in addition to Lefever's (2007) video (http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english), helped me significantly with learning about what RSS were. Lefever's initial description of RSS caught my attention immediately, considering the importance of efficiency to me, and his use of the Netflix analogy of describing this fascinating tool made me feel stupid for not knowing about this technology earlier. Even as a high school student, I loved to browse online for information I was interested in, and compulsively organized my hundreds of bookmarks into neat compartments. The RSS fits in with my passion for seeking information very well, as it "sends up to date and relevant information to you to read in your own time" (Rowse, 2010). Shareski's (2008) analogy of RSS also helped convince me that I could take advantage of this tool and that I should incorporate it into my PLE, as he likened it to having a free team to help me do up to date research (http://ideasandthoughts.org/2007/04/19/whos-on-your-research-team/). As a psychology student wanting to go into graduate studies to do research in mental health, having this tool in my PLE will allow me to keep up to date to the newest information in the field. I have a significant interest in learning about PTSD, and immediately after learning to use the RSS, I was able to subscribe to blogs written by real-life individuals influenced by PTSD. Learning about mental health issues from a textbook is one thing, but to read descriptions of real life experience is absolutely invaluable and reminds me of the real reason I got into psychology. Having an RSS update me on these individuals' process and expanding my PLE to incorporate real life experiences and knowledge is without a question an incredibly valuable asset to my learning! I am beyond excited to apply this tool into my learning this semester!

(Ó Sionnaigh, 2013) 

It is very hard to group the RSS into a specific category in my PLE, mainly because it involves so many different aspects of my PLE. As seen in the image above, it involves practicing digital literacy (searching for information with wikis and news sources, and content management), organizing content (with bookmarks), and collaborating and socializing (with Flickr and blogs). While I wouldn't necessarily put it in only one part of my PLE, it will be a recurring element of it.

With RSS providing us with more opportunities to interact with others through our increasingly wide PLN, digital responsibility and citizenship has an increasing role in our lives - we must use the resources we have safely and respectfully. With power comes responsibility, so it becomes more important that we behave as responsible online citizens, and element 5 (digital etiquette) (Ribble, 2011) becomes especially important as we interact with various posters from websites that we are subscribed to.

Furthermore, one of the blogs that was given to us as an example was Edutopia, and through that, I was able to find some very interesting posts that contribute to my work this semester in building digital literacy, responsibility, and citizenship. Johnson (2014) (http://www.edutopia.org/blog/creating-learning-environments-ben-johnson) discusses the prevalence of digital literacy in young people, with students easily able to retrieve information in a incredibly short amount of time. The role of the instructor, he argues, is to help students understand why what they are learning is important - which is definitely how I feel the role of the instructor is in this course. Marcinek (2013) states in his blog, also on Edutopia, (http://www.edutopia.org/blog/the-path-to-digital-citizenship-andrew-marcinek) that "students must understand that there should be no difference between how they act online and how they act offline." I could not agree more with this statement, and I've noticed that we've all been educated to behave in kind and civilized ways throughout our journey in the public school system, so if young adults of our age could transfer the knowledge and skills they've learned for behaving respectfully towards each other, there would be much less abuse of the magnificent tool that we have available to us.

In all, I'm incredibly glad that I got to learn about the RSS this week, and cannot wait to apply it to my academic and personal learning this semester!