Blogging on Demand and Shopping with RSS

I am feeling a little bit like my students must -- I have been "assigned" a blog. Ugh. Somehow the fact that I have been given a topic and sent to my blogging room is not sitting well with my blogging muse. And this makes me wonder what we are doing to blogging with our students. Remember when journals were the rage? Students had to "journal" for every class! What a chore! Now my seniors are working on three blogs, and I had planned to introduce a fourth tomorrow! Too much!

That said, I enjoyed tooling around a few suggested blogs, experiencing the variety, seeing the form's flexibility. I learned a few things too -- glogs can be embedded on wikispaces, for instance. Good to know.

And I'm getting more comfortable with commenting, especially when I read the blogs of the "big dogs." Blogging is liberating in that way -- I am allowed to offer something of value to the conversation based on my thinking and experience.

I am going to use this blog to talk about RSS too. I have been using RSS ever since Will Richardson himself taught me how to do it at an ISTE poster session oh so long ago. It amazes me still how so many people don't know how what RSS is or how to use it to make their lives easier.

I think I use RSS a bit differently, however. I'm definitely not a daily reader -- don't have the time. But I do use it to "shop around" to various blogs I like when I have a spare moment before class or when I'm on hold on the telephone. There is a surprise element here that I like -- I never know what will turn up. It's a bit like a controlled stumbleupon indulgence.

I have used iGoogle to gather my students' work or to corral updated sites for their further study and reflection. This is iGoogle's attraction for me over Google Reader -- I can see a whole page of sites at a glance, and I can share groups of them with others, as in this collection of my seniors' project sites (one of the results of our PLP work last year). iReader may do this too, for all I know (it has been a long time since I've used it). I have heard lately that it's good for sharing comments with a group over time, sort of google wave fashion.

Back to my earlier point, however... I wonder if we need to show a little blog restraint. At what point do we reach OVERKILL?