Following NECC: Here’s my RSS page

Every time my students and I have a new topic, we create a new PLN. A personal learning network in the form of an RSS page aggregates all things of interest and gives one a starting point.

If you have netvibes, here is the page I've made over there, or you may click the button below to just add it to your own netvibes –

Opening Twitter to everyone
It is so important to be inclusive. Not everyone is on twitter, but shouldn't they be able to be “in on” the tweets?

You'll see that the netvibes page has a hashtag for twitter on it. Here is how it works:

1. Follow @hashtags
   Hashtags is an “opt in” service, which means you have to tell it that you want to be indexed. If you don't follow the hashtags user, you can use #necc all day but WILL NOT be included. Don't worry, hashtags won't tweet you back, it doesn't work that way.
2. When you tweet about something at necc put #necc in your tweet. It will then automatically go to the hashtags page for necc. This page has a nice little RSS (that provided the rss feed for the netvibes page.)

To follow this in your own rss reader, just add the rss feed on this page to your rss reader. (Put the url of the page in your reader, it should find the feed automatically as it did for me.)

Why not use necc2008 or necc08?

My pet peeve is two digit years for the date — we act as if we learned nothing from y2K and will require someone to reindex our work another 100 years from now — I guess many people don't want their work to stick around that long, but if y2k taught me anything it is to use 4 digit dates.

So, we could use necc2008 — the only thing is that digits are scarce in twitter – you get 140 characters. So, why can't we follow necc? Just in case, however, there is a hashtag for necc2008 so it will take both.

Also following the necc 2008 ning — have subscribed to the blog posts and pictures there — there is quite a nice gallery growing there.

OK, have fun following necc. And let me remind you. If you're having a pity party that you cannot come, my first year in 2006, I made it a point to cover virtually everything that was happening and many people thought I was there. I put on my slippers and immersed myself in everything happening. It is not quite like being there, however, it is still a very enriching experience.

necc, necc2008, twitter, hashtags, education, learning, conference