My First Experience with RSS and Blogging (The Cone of Dale and the Imagination of Siegel)

I must say that my impression of using a blog has been very good, after I figure out how to create a blog I found myself enjoying the whole process of the design. Actually I’m a fan of blogs, but I haven’t had the interest on creating one, till now.

Now that I have my own blog I want to improve the design and add all kinds of attractive apps like put the links of my RSS feeds, but I have not find out how to do that yet. To create the RSS was really easy, I did not have any experience or expectation with that before, but now I've noticed the utility of this application; I can easy track all the updates of my favorite blogs without opening one by one.

The parts of Dale’s Cone that I think lends themselves best to the tools we have used so far in this class are; well the truth is that was undecided between: Visual symbol, Verbal Symbols and recordings, radio, still pictures.

What parts fit better and why? That was a period of time we did not have all the technology advances that we have today, so the difference is heaven to earth. I chose Visual symbols because as the author say in this division of the cone, we are not longer involved with the realistic reproduction of physical things. In the creation of our blogs physical things were not involved, but we had a learning experience, we also had to use verbal symbols to upload information to the blog. The different is that with the new technologies advance that we have now, we can combine visual and verbal symbols with motion picture, recordings, radio and still pictures. The RSS tools is more a verbal symbol with this you can tell easily which sites have made an updates in its content, but it’s also a visual symbol, you can notice the updates without reading, just by looking  the colors or numbers that symbolize any change.

I think there are many imaginative educational uses for a blog. The idea that you can become a journalist and document all your assignments like a professional is very attractive for, me as student and as a teacher. In a blog you not just post something and that's it, actually you have the feeling that you can publish something really important and make a change in the world or at least make your voice heard. With a blog, students can share their ideas and they can look into their classmate blogs and in that way they can have a much more wide perspective of the assignments.

It’s funny that you have mentioned Postman’s question, because I enjoyed so much his interrogations.  What is the problem to which RSS is an answer? Well I would not say it's a problem to solve, but it is an advantage to use this tool to keep students updated with assignments in an easy and faster way.