Blogging and Da Chen

Author Da Chen was the speaker at Convocation this past Monday night, and was by all accounts a huge success. He also met  with First Year College students, which was fitting since Chen’s “Colors of the Mountain” was this year’s FYC Summer Reading Assignment.

What I find interesting are all the blog posts by students in response to Chen’s visit on campus. Most (if not all) appear to be on students’ personal blogs and not related to class assignments. I haven’t carefully studied campus culture and attitudes via blog postings, but it was certainly noticable that Da Chen postings dominated the WolfBlog’s “recent posts” list most every day this week. It is great to see students capturing their thoughts in a way that lets the rest of us peek in.

ncstate.edu

After reading this article in the Chronicle about branding and domain names, I decided to see what happened when I went to http://ncstate.edu/ and yep, sure enough, it goes to our university home page. And not just a redirect to http://www.ncsu.edu/ but rather it maintaints “ncstate.edu” in the address field. I can remember in the early or mid-1990’s when there was a specific effort on our campus to move away from “NCSU” and use “NC State” instead. It is good to see we already own the “ncstate.edu” domain. There is a group on campus working on branding and marketing for the campus. I wonder if this was a result of that group’s current work, or just some diligent individual who thought of this on their own awhile back.

Google Reader Observations

I think sometimes I’m quite late to start using some technologies- at least compared to techies I know. But then I realize I’m usually one of the first among my peers in Student Affairs to really explore various gadgets, software and other tools and then I don’t have the late adopter blues.

In this case, the tool is Google Reader. I had played with Pluck a year or so ago. When I decided to truly explore the RSS more fully, I was surprised to see that Pluck no longer provided the feed reader service. Deciding against a stand-alone product, I looked at web-based readers and decided to give Google Reader a try. It was well reviewed and seemed the obvious choice.  It’s been great so far. Here are a few observations:

1. Adding subscriptions is even easier when you change your Firefox preferences (version 2.0.0.6 in my case) to automatically subscribe feeds you select to Google Reader.

2. Managing subscriptions can be a little tricky until you  work with it a bit.  You organize feeds into “folders” which are also referred to as “tags” and thus the confusion.

3. There is only one level of folders and no sub-folders. But you can put the same feed into more than one folder.

4. The  “star item” feature lets you quickly note which items you want to come back to later. This is great when you don’t have time to read in depth and/or think you might want to forward the item to others.

5. The available feed bundles are a good way to get started, though some have broken links.

6. I haven’t yet explored the sharing feature. I’d be interested in hearing from others how they use this.

7. Going offline is fabulous. On a recent trip, I clicked on the “offline” arrow, which then downloaded all my un-read feeds onto that local computer. Then, while on the plane ride home, I was able to go through all my feeds. Once I returned home and connected that computer to the internet, I clicked the same arrow button, which took me online to the Google Reader and updated my account to show what I had read.

8. Using the “J” (forward) and “K” (back) keys for viewing feeds is a nice alternative to using the mouse scroll wheel or arrow keys.

I’ll be posting soon on how I plan to educate others in my Division about this tool, which I believe will really improve efficiency for many who regularly review mutlitple websites.