RSS=Real Stress for Students? Shouldn’t be…
We have already gone over this idea a lot in class, but it’s of such relevance in today’s classrooms that I can’t help but bring it up in my blog as well. It has to do with students writing for the internet and how it is different from writing on paper just for the classroom and teacher.
I found a blog on Blogs for Learning called “The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom.” This is a blog headed by Dr. Nicole Ellison and Dr. Ethan Watrall from Michigan State University and it was created for “students and instructors who are interested in the theory and practice of blogging within an educational setting.” Well, I guess it is right on track for my interests, then. What I found in the article mentioned above by David Parry are his views and ideas on the importance of blogging and of student knowledge of RSS. He is disappointed to know that only one in ten of students (who are supposed to be the most “tech-savvy” generation) have heard of RSS feeds and would know what to do with them. I am afraid that until I took this class, I was one of those disappointing students…but I am well on my way to becoming much more literate when it comes to reading and writing for the internet.
When I first started to make my RSS notebook, I have to say that I was not sure what I was doing. I still have trouble going through all of the articles that come up in my notebook because it seems that some of my feeds get so many at once that I cannot keep track. But luckily, with practice, finding the articles that are relevant to my blog is slowly becoming less and less of a burden and waste of time. Parry makes this point in his article when he says,
”RSS helps to give students control over content on the web, reducing time spent navigating from site to site to see what has changed, and instead allowing them to receive updates about the content they are interested in tracking or material that is relevant to class.”
“The speed of reading in the age of the digital has changed, and we need to help students navigate this. Being able to “surf” around countless webpages, scanning information, might be a good practice for cursory knowledge acquisition, but it does not lend itself to in-depth reading. In fact, I would argue that these are almost two separate mental practices. And it is important to teach students to distinguish between these two. Reading on the internet requires two separate skills: one, the quick analysis to find what is worth reading, and the second, a switch to slow analysis to carefully consider what has been found.”
This is something that may take a bit of practice, but with RSS, the job is more than half done for you. A student has already chosen what areas of a newspaper or blog they want as part of their RSS, and so all they have to do is skim the headlines, mark the ones that seem relevant, and discard the rest. Then, when they have time, they can come back to those articles that hopefully had some relevance and read them in-depth. I know for me, this all seemed overwhelming, and I am sure that a lot of students (even those who have a bit more internet experience than me) feel the same way. It seems like a lot, but once it is started, it can change the way you use the internet.
The importance of this to me as a future teacher is what it can mean for my students. They will no longer be writing all of their papers to me and handing them in for a grade, but instead they will be posting up blogs with their own ideas that are relevant to society today. When teachers asked me to collect newspapers and cut out articles and then write a short paper about the article and how it is important to me and society I thought, “Eugh…what a bunch of hassle.” But for students now, even just a few years later, this idea is not the hassle it once was. Everything they need is right in one place, on the internet, so they can sit down and collect articles from all over the world that interest them and then comment on their blogs–all without ever leaving their seat.
The blogs, of course, should not be understood and written in the same way that the students would write a paper to be handed in. What blogging brings to the table is an entirely different audience for the students to write to…and so their writing gains new scope, meaning, and most importantly to me, ownership. The idea of authorship and everything that comes along with it is one of the biggest importances to Parry. He gives a list of different aspects to authorship and what they can mean to students:
First: “Teaching students to write blogs without at least providing the idea behind RSS is like teaching them to write papers on word processors, but never showing them how to use spell check, find and replace, italics or any of the formatting tools; it just repeats the prior technical moment of writing. In order to be successful authors in this space, students need to construct content that takes advantage of the iterability and citationality that the web offers.”
Second: “By using RSS, you can syndicate all of the students blogs…Furthermore, RSS can facilitate commenting, as most blogs will allow you to syndicate the comments to a specific post…this will help students to realize how writing for the web is a matter of continuos conversation rather than static paper design.”
Third: “…digital content is increasingly syndicated. Thus, writing without an awareness of how your writing may be syndicated can lead to addressing your audience in an ineffective way…Writing with the possibility that content will be read in syndication requires that writers recognize the different ways in which their writing is likely to become re-contextualized.”
So, what these points about authorship show is that digital writing is a different game than the traditional mode of classroom writing. As teachers, we have to be aware of both types of writing and it is also our job to inform our students about the different avenues available to them and when they are most relevant. It is impossible to say that one type of writing is more important than another in a classroom, and I am not trying to push in favor of one over another. I know that both will be utilized in my classroom one day, and it is important for me (and all other teachers/future teachers) to know how to approach the subject of writing in all of its forms.
