E-Learning and Online Teaching

Robin Good: News and content curators are always hungry for RSS feeds, as these are the best vehicle to receive any change-update from a web site without needing to go out and check. But not always, web public services that let users generate content, are open and happy to let you grab a RSS feed.

 

Case in point Pinterest. 

 

While the service provides a RSS feed for any user that includes all of the updates and posts he has made, these are all uncategorized and mixed together, regardless of which board they were collected in.

 

"To generate this RSS simply click on the user’s profile and select the RSS icon on the left of the page. Another way to do this is to add feed.rss to the end of the user’s profile; for example, if you want to see the latest pins by Felicia Day your RSS URL would look like this http://pinterest.com/feliciaday/feed.rss."

 

To get instead the RSS feed for a specific board, here is what you need to do:

"...first open the board (e.g. Felicia Day’s Geekin Board), then, remove the last “/” from the URL and add .rss – your end URL will look like http://pinterest.com/feliciaday/geekin.rss

The RSS feed will show you the last 20 or so pins created in that board rather than the full contents."

 

Useful. 8/10

Full article: http://sociable.co/social-media/how-to-generate-rss-feeds-for-a-pinterest-user-and-specific-pinterest-boards/  

Via Robin Good

The Internet has made researching subjects deceptively effortless for students — or so it may seem to them at first. Truth is, students who haven’t been taught the skills to conduct good research will invariably come up short.

Via Nik Peachey

If sleep is essential to processing information we receive during the day, we probably need to make sure we have sufficient media-free downtime during our waking hours in order to effectively assimilate today's massive incoming infostreams. -- Howard

 

"In the midst of this multimedia blitzkrieg, the importance of mindfulness and focused attention is rising. If we can't cultivate mindfulness and focused attention while sitting quietly in a room, then how can we expect to bring these qualities of mind into turbulent circumstances -- both on and offline?

FRACTURED ATTENTION, FRACTURED MIND
The average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words every single day, according to the 2008 report from UC San Diego. To put these numbers in perspective, one gigabyte is a symphony in high-fidelity sound or a broadcast quality movie."

Via Howard Rheingold

The Xconomy team posed this question to their network [read: an older audience], reaching out to the people they knew “it would resonate well with.” And while we’ll include some of the answers they received, we decided to reach out to our own network and ask the question ourselves, curious as to whether a younger audience — whether they be fresh out of college, going for their MBA, or newly into their thirties, still trying to figure things out — would have something different to say.

Via Nik Peachey

Why teach search?

Google understands the importance of finding the right information at the right time. We create tools to let you find the information you need, of the kind you need, when you need it. In most cases, a simple search works really well. But for more specialized questions, a bit of instruction in how to search improves all searcher--from middle school students to trained professionals--and lets you discover and use more, higher quality sources than ever before.