PLE LMS RSS -- Lots of acronyms here

A personal learning environment consists of Web 2.0 tools utilized by a student to enhance their learning. In essence, it provides tools for tracking one's progress, setting goals, collaborating with fellow students and interacting with an instructor. It is flexible and suits the needs of the student/learner rather than the directives of the institution or professor.

This contrasts with learning management systems, which are designed to assist instructors and institutions in simplifying many of the logistical things associated with instruction, such as assessment, assignment tracking, and grade management. Where PLEs are flexible and individualized, LMSes are generally rigid in design and structure. PLEs are often made up of open-source and freely available software and services, whereas LMSes tend to suck more resources from the institution and, as a result, seem to languish as other more agile technologies flourish and evolve.

RSS stands for real simple syndication. It is an XML schema that is used to present information from frequently updated sites in a standard format that can be read by a feed-reader -- a program designed to process the data in an RSS feed and present it to the end user in human-readable format. A person can subscribe to multiple sites' RSS feed and then all the information can be aggregated on the user's machine without having to actually go to each site to seek out the information.

RSS feeds help make learning more efficient by aggregating headlines of topics of interest to me that I could scour frequently. Rather than having to take extra time to seek out the knowledge through searches, I can let the computer (and the people writing the feeds) do the work.

A couple of feeds I'm subscribing to:

A university professor summarizes headlines regarding educational technology from the daily news that might be relevant to educators: http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/blogger.html

I thought it would be interesting to see what emerges from the USU Instructional Psychology feed: http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/ocw_itls/

I also figured WiredCampus would be a good source for getting a feel for the direction higher education is going with technology: http://chronicle.com/blog/Wired-Campus/5/rss

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