EDT5410 - Week 2 Response

        Last week, I created my own blog at this address: linhle90.blogspot.com, and also start to use RSS Reader (Feedly) this week. I have to say that the blog is not as amazing as I expected, but Feedly is extremely impressive to me. I will talk about Blog first. To me, it is like a "Notes" feature of Facebook, but has a little bit more options. Blog can help us to make a long note just like using Microsoft Word and after finishing it, we can publish that note on the Internet immediately. The greatest feature of Blog to me is I can manage all of my notes in a single page, see how many people have read that post, or how they commented on my notes. We can insert some photos or videos into the Blog also. Conversely, RSS Reader changed my habit surfing the Internet. I have never known about Feedly and its features before. Now I don't have to visit every single website to check the news or update that I need anymore. I only have to check my Feedly to see if one of these topics that I'm interested in has updated new information or article. For example, I don't have to visit some website to check if new manga chapter was released every week anymore. From now on, the new chapter will automatically appears on my Feedly list as soon as it is released.

            From my point of view, there is no level of Dane's Cone is appropriate with Blog and RSS because this scale was made from 1969, and Blog, RSS, or the Internet generally did not exist at that time. If we don't mention about the Internet connection, I would put Blog into Verbal Symbols level of Dane's Cone. Without Internet connection, I consider Blog as a list of notes and articles. It would be full of words explaining some concepts or analyzing other topics. However, Dane said the boundaries between these levels are not really clear at anytime, sometimes these levels overlap each other and it is hard to define them. Due to the feature inserting photos and videos, Blog also should be put in the levels of Visual Symbols and Motion Pictures, sometimes Educational Television. Second, it would be really hard to decide which level of Dane's Cone that I should put RSS in. The main purpose of using RSS Reader is to summary the news that the user is interested in, so that I would set it in the level of Exhibits. Just like attending an exhibition which has their favorite topics, the users can see many items or objects that they care about and then choose some (or all) of them to read and see.

            Considering Siegel’s concept of “computer imagination”, I believe that Blog and RSS have great potential in education. To begin with, Blog allows the students to read and learn from far distance. They can read the lecture from the teacher or the responses from other learners at home. In traditional class, we have to go to school, buy a book and meet other people to share the papers. Furthermore, if we need to find the document that we wrote a long time ago, it would not be easy if it is a hard copy. However, Blog can list all of your papers with their title in chronicle order and the user can select the one that he or she needs. It also can help the professor to check how many students have read their articles also. Secondly, using RSS Reader can bring even more advantages than Blog. This application allows people to check the news or articles from the sources that they subscribed. It is like an online library which can update itself almost immediately. The learners can follow their teachers and classmates to see if they post something new. The main purposes of RSS are saving time finding new articles in a bunch of websites and receiving the information that is important and necessary. If we don't use RSS Reader, maybe we still have to come to the library and check every single book to see if they have some paragraphs that contain the information we need.