CCK08: Let’s begin to work together …

About half of the expected final number of students have enrolled, that’s fine.

Now, in order to give substance to the blogroom you have to begin to use web feeds (in italiano … vista la differenza?) so that each of you can be aware of what others, included myself, have written in their own blogs.

First, you should subscribe to Google Reader. This is the feed reader (also called aggregator) provided by Google, among other web services. There are other feed readers in the internet or even applications you can download to run on your computer. Among the last ones I sometimes use RSSOwl which is an open source software. I do not care which reader you use and if you are already familiar with one of them (both standalone applications or web servers) you can go on with it. However, if you are totally new to feed readers then it is probably better if you begin with Google Reader in order to facilitate my task to help those that may have problems. You can always switch to other feed readers later on if you like it.

Once you have your feed reader ready for use try to upload the OPML file with the feeds of the blogroom blogs. An OPML file is a file written in XML to exchange collections of web feeds. I prepared this OPML file with the feeds of the blogs available in the blogroom so far. As new students will enroll I will update this OPML file.

Do not expect detailed instructions from me. You should try to find your own way at first. In the beginning it may be harder but in the following, as soon as you will begin to succeed you will feel not bad at all …

If you experience problems, go and ask fellows in your classrooms, ask friends, try together with them, play with them. As a last resort, ask me.

Once the list of feeds will be happily ready in your reader go and browse the other blogs. You belong to 18 different curricula and I have not grouped the feeds according the curricula 😉

So, you have to find your classmates within the blogroom. Once you have found your classmates you can group them by tagging them. What does this means? Well, go and learn what a tag is, for instance in the Google Reader help, or somewhere else. It may also be that you find something interesting in blogs of other curricula; you may also make new friends and this is a good thing!

It may happen that you go through this first step quite fast and you may wonder what will be the next one. In order to prepare yourselves for the next step you can go to browse the contents in the wiki. Then you may have a look at what the Open Educational Resources (OER in wiki content, OER Wikipedia) are and then you may try to look for some OER related to the contents available in the wiki. Do not attempt to read everything. It is not possible nor it is useful, probably. In real life you can never do everything, except in some trivial circumstances. You should just browse, read something here, just skim something there.

You should focus on the contents that may be somewhat related to your experiences or some expertise you already have. For instance, have you had a problem with a virus? Well, try to relate what you can find within the contents, or related OER, with your past experience.

Have a good time 🙂