Tour de Blog #1

 Have you been checking out the blogs? So much good stuff going on! Take a look at the summary below (maybe you're in it? if not, maybe next time?), visit some blogs, and leave some commenty goodness!

• Dami tell us how he found his people as he prepared for graduate school far from home.
• JNSU26 offers up an insightful perspective on this whole digital native movement, touching on what it all really means and SHOULD mean for teaching / learning. 
• Maria tells us about her shift to the online teaching world.
• Web 2.0 Learning Lab shares an amusing story of realizing that the kids she taught clearly grew up with different tech. 
• Jellyfish took a deep dive and found the Memex, connecting it to currrent ... well ... connections!
• Blake brings us back to the wayback of Myspace. Who else was friends with Myspace Tom?
• Manouche reflects on how technology keeps changing and changing our lives.
• MnLV no longer feels like a digital toddler (I was chuckling at that phrasing) and has RSS up and running. Now go say hi on that blog!
• From N(ash)ville With Love shares a contemporary view on networked creators, exploring how things have changed since Rainie and Wellman's Networked was published.
• Brownie Bee is reflecting on how she has experienced communities online, but maybe not really focused on the intentionality of it all.
• KGabbing, inspired by the Asuncion (2026) article, did an AI-enhanced exploration of toxicity and gaming communities.
• Small Potato is thinking about Reddit (did SP know we were headed to Reddit this week?) and wants to know about your experiences and favorite subreddits.
• We missed Prof Stein's birthday ... but it's not too late to go leave a happy birthday comment and read some musings on hashtags (which are dead, or not really dead, but just not as useful for aggregation as they once were. Oh, but that post ends with performative hashtags).

RSS: Brought down by the algorithm but still alive

 

I make no secret of the fact that I really like RSS. It is not that I dislike algorithms. They have their place. But there are things I want to follow closely, and I do not want to miss a beat.

Let me take you back to the summer of 2004: 

I was a new faculty member, living in a new town, and most of my friends were scattered across other cities and countries. The internet was how I stayed connected to people and ideas. While spending time online, I found blogs. Not celebrity blogs or corporate content, but blogs written by people like me. 

As I started following more and more bloggers, I discovered RSS. At the time, I used a reader called Bloglines. It aggregated all of my favorite blogs into one place. I loved that I could add new blogs as I found them and then simply check one site to see what had been updated. It was so much better than clicking from blog to blog, hoping something new had been posted. Soon I realized I could subscribe to more than blogs. News outlets offered topic-specific feeds, so I could follow only the areas I cared about. Journals had feeds that notified me when new articles were published. RSS became an easy, efficient way to track people, topics, and publications across the web. It felt organized and intentional. I controlled what I saw.

At some point, the big companies caught on. Google launched its own RSS reader, folded it into its ecosystem alongside Blogger, and bought out competitors. This is a familiar story. For a while, it worked beautifully. And then Google Reader was shut down.

The explanation was that people no longer used it. That was not entirely true. But by then, something else had taken over.

Algorithmic feeds.

Platforms like Facebook shifted away from simple, chronological content. If you were an early Facebook user, you might remember how different it felt. Posts appeared slowly. You primarily saw updates from people you actually knew. Now the feed is fast, dense, and filled with content chosen for you based on your past engagement.

Those algorithms are designed to keep us scrolling. The more time we spend on the platform, the more profitable it becomes. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense. But it also means we are no longer just seeing what we chose to follow. If we were limited to posts from people and organizations we explicitly subscribed to, many of us would encounter far less content. And perhaps we would spend less time there.

Some people have stepped away from these platforms for exactly that reason. Even for those of us who remain, something about that earlier experience is still appealing. I miss the clarity of RSS. I miss opening a feed and knowing that what I saw was exactly what I had asked to see.

I would go back to that in a heartbeat.

That said, RSS is not dead. It quietly thrives in places like podcasting. When you subscribe to a podcast, you are using RSS. You expect to be notified when a new episode drops. You are not looking for a random algorithmic suggestion to start with episode 35 of something you have never heard before. You want your content in order, from the sources you choose. So RSS is still here. We just don't talk about it much anymore. And we no longer have the same level of awareness or easy access to RSS-style aggregation across our everyday online experiences.

Maybe that is what I miss most: the sense of control I had when RSS was Queen.

Challenges and Badges

 Week 3 is almost here, and that’s when we will begin challenges and badges.

To get a full sense of what we’re doing, I encourage you to review the Zoom recording (it’s only about 15 minutes long, you can watch it at 1.5 speed if you like) and learn more about what will be happening. 

You can find it under the Zoom link in the Canvas sidebar menu [look for Cloud Recordings] and I put the link in the Module 2 file list, too.

The brief version is:

Entirely optional and just for fun, I’ll be issuing “challenges” here on the blog. I’ll announce them on Instagram, too, but the full details will appear on the blog. You can complete the challenge if you want, and if you do you’ll receive a digital badge. The challenges vary, but are designed to give you things to try out using different platforms. Engaging in challenges and earning badges will count toward participation in the course. Again: you do you, but I look forward to seeing some of you play along.

And until we actually begin the real challenges, here’s an informal one. Consider it a soft challenge (like a soft opening of a business): Share a photo that depicts something that you've learned recently. Maybe you work it into a blog post, maybe you post to Instagram. 

If you do the soft challenge, leave a comment here (what did you post, where did you post it) so we know to go look for it.

Who are we?

Just in case you were curious, or maybe thought you were the only one who had never used a particular platform or maybe the only one who didn't know a concept ... Mmmm. You have company. Plus you're here to learn.

Here's an overview of the class from our intro survey.

Any surprises? Or is this about what you would have thought?

How do we find each other?

Finding people -- specifically, the people you want to find -- online can be a chore.

In the early days, the question to ask was, "Are you online?" because few people were. 

As people came online, we searched for their names and connected. We invited them to join and connect. We looked at who was connected to our connections and found more people we knew or wanted them to know, and invited them to connect.

And then the algorithm came along and started making its suggestions (brief article on how it works). Some suggestions were helpful, some were useless (suggestions that you connect with a complete stranger), and some were uncomfortable (suggestions that you connect with someone who had caused harm or ill feelings in the past). What shifted here was not just convenience, but also control.

Most of us don't want to leave it all up to the algorithm, so how can we find each other across fragmented platforms?

Using this class as an example, we know we can find each other in Canvas. We're starting to be able to find each other's blogs (see the blogroll in the sidebar). Can we find each other in other spaces? Maybe yes, maybe no. 

I know I'm easy to find if I use my real name (I don't think anyone else on the planet shares my first and last name combo), but my husband has a far more common name and is less easy to find. Names alone don't do the trick a lot of the time. Sometimes we need to add other identifiers to the search, like email, location, or profession. Could we all find each other on LinkedIn? Maybe, maybe not. How about Instagram? I bet that would be more difficult. 

We can use hashtags (#eme6414) to help aggregate our activities across spaces. However, we're still somewhat at the mercy of the algorithm there. Some algorithms play nice with hashtags, others use them but are selective in what gets surfaced.

Sometimes we know we want to find certain people, but we don't know who we are looking for. For example, I might want to find people who share an interest or experience. In those instances, I may go back to the hashtags to see if they surface others with shared interests, or I might seek an existing affinity group space where those cool kids are already hanging out.

If it sounds a bit like finding a needle in a haystack, well, at times it is exactly like that. And yet people keep searching, and people keep finding those needles (and a whole lot of hay, too).

What's been your needle-in-a-haystack experience? 

The Choose Your Own Adventure Course

 We're only one day into this course, and hopefully you're starting to see that this is a choose-your-own experience course.

 

Do you remember choose your own adventure books? Where you got to make decisions about what would happen next?

You are in a dark hallway. The only light is seeping through the crack of what may be a door at the end of the hall. You walk down the long, dark hallway toward the light. When you near the end of the hall, you pass a narrow table with a phone on it. Just as you reach the door at the end, you see an envelope on the floor. The envelope is halfway under the door. The phone begins to ring. You:
a. Answer the phone
b. Pick up the envelope
c. Open the door

I loved those books! The idea that I had a choice and could be immersed in the storytelling was so much fun.

I feel like this course is a similar experience. It's not entirely scripted, but it's also not entirely unscripted. You can be your own protagonist here. I'm going to use this post to highlight some of the choices you have and explain why (pedagogically speaking) I'm giving you this choice.

Welcome to EME6414, Summer 2026 Edition

 Hey there! Hooray! You made it! 

We've been waiting for you since last August, when the 2025 edition of EME6414 ended.

This is the blog I will be using to share links and small tidbits of interest throughout the course, as well as to provide some links to and highlight content from your blogs (sort of a "best of"). Through the sidebar, there will also be links to various class-related tools.

Your TA and I will be posting to this blog, and we encourage your comments and conversation.

Just a reminder -- if you don't want your name appearing online in this context, don't use your name. You may write your blog under a nom de plume, choose a Twitter pseudonym, and so on. I will link to your blog and refer to you in this space using whatever online name you choose. I just need to know for assessment purposes that "Mary Smith" is posting as "Wonder Woman."

Catch the wave and let the wild Internet ride begin!