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Finally, the Chalkface Blog has an RSS feed. For good measure, we’ve added RSS feeds to each news category (Teachers, Students, Default) and all 31 product category listings on the site.

What’s RSS?

Really Simple Syndication is a system that makes all kinds of timed information (news feeds, blogs, student assignments….) much more accessible than they are through the web alone. Here’s how it works.

You get hold of a piece of software called an RSS aggregator. Good free ones are NetNewsWire (Mac) or FeedReader (PC). You tell it which sites you want to watch (provided they have RSS feeds), then every few minutes it goes and grabs headlines or whole articles from those sites. You can skim them in your own time, clicking through to the original website if the article seems interesting enough.

Mine’s become my morning newspaper, containing news from the sources I trust, together with third-party compilations of news in topics of interest to me. Here are just a few of my regulars – once you’ve got your RSS aggregator installed, feel free to copy these links:

• BBC education news
• Samuel Pepys’ Diary (400 years out of date!)
• EdTech
• Burnt Toast
• Chalkface Blog (always check my own to make sure it’s working)

Since Rob Daniels left Heinemann, British educational publishing has lost its best resource on metadata and related information management concepts. So I found this article Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! (via OL Daily) extremely useful as an overview of what all the jargon means.

It also helped crystallise my opinions on the use and misuse of metadata. I can see that within a bounded professional community, one of these formal systems can be very useful. But once you get outside that you hit no end of problems:

• Multiple metadata systems conflict
• Metadata creators game the system
• Users won’t adopt the disciplined behaviour required
• Only predicted uses of the information are supported

Thinking about the particular case of how teachers discover teaching resources, my personal experience of talking to teachers is that their three top criteria are

1. very specific content
2. recommended by a credible source
3. suitable for the age, ability, literacy, gender and mood of their particular students

Looking at these in order:

1 requires so much metadata that you are better off looking at the whole text of a resource. At Chalkface, for example, this week’s top hit for the About search engine was ‘taunting and coping’. I certainly would not have predicted that combination when writing metadata for any of our resources.

2 is best dealt with through a reputation system; you certainly can’t allow the owner of a resource to write their own metadata on its reputation!

3 can be addressed to some extent by metadata but in practise it involves multiple tradeoffs. How, for example, do you code material suitable for a very bright Somali girl with limited English and a moral code way outside the norm for this country?

What all of this boils down to is an explanation of why far more teachers use Google to find teaching resources than use Curriculum Online (COL). I’d love to see COL reorganise their system as a value-add front end on Google, but I suspect that after such a huge investment they’ll be unwilling to admit that their metadata emperor is naked.

I argued in an earlier post for schools to invest in desktop, not laptop computers. I don’t like laptops because they are heavy, expensive and altogether too nickable. But what when mobile computers become as small, light and inexpensive as an exercise book?

One technology that will make this possible is digital paper. This device, to be launched by Philips and Sony later this year is a step towards computers you will need to treat with about as much respect as a biro. Full press release here, if you want more details.