One of the issues these days is that there is just simply SO MUCH information out there.  It floats around us, as if we exist at the middle of a large soup, with floating blobs of information: some tasty bits and some we would prefer to avoid.

One of our challenges is to assist learners to make sense of this seemingly unconnected ’soup’ of information.  Authentic learning and understanding will come from the ability to connect new information to something which is already internalised and understood.

For many of us adults, there is also much to be gained from being able to focus on the information streams which are highly relevent and of value within the work we do.

One possible step in assisting this process is the aggregation of relevant information in accessible places.  With RSS and other means of bringing information streams together, we can customise what we see, to assist us to make sense of it.

The recent rise of Twitter has seen thinkers like Scott McLeod put forward the idea of an aggregated set of Twitter feeds in his post here.

You can also see an example of a teacher making great use of a Pageflakes aggregator to display a large number of feeds here.  There are many feed aggregators available.  Netvibes is another popular one and you’ll find many more with a Google search.

If you are interested in seeing some possibilities of what this might look like within a DET environment, then have a look at this mock up page.  (If asked for a login, use your DET portal login with the suffix @det added to the end of it.)

This entry was posted on May 26, 2009 at 9:39 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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