Journal 2 Blog Post: Affinity Groups and RSS

The Professional Learning Community is an opportunity for professionals to link with others on topics of common interest.  Certainly, the concept is a meaningful one, but the reality was one of frustration.  Most of the links that I found of interest, were no longer active, or had not been active for years, and others required a fee.  I appreciate that many of the communities were international, as I this offers an opportunity to see what’s happening in other cultural communities. 

 My Digg experience was more pleasant.  I was not familiar with Digg, so this was an absolutely new experience for me.  I love new experiences, and Digg did not disappoint…much!  I loved the presentation: visual, interesting, current, with an easy to follow front-page format. However, some of the other elements were not so easy to make sense of.  For example, once I marked the sites that I was interested in, I wasn’t sure what had happened or what to expect.  Only after clicking around the site, did I come across my site selection.  They were listed in a column, which I added to another column, and apparently something was supposed to happen.  I’ll see how this RSS feed all comes together.

Question 1: 

What are challenges identified with PLCs?

Answer 1:

Some challenges that have been encountered and identified in the utilization of PLCs are a lack of team development, building trust, conflict resolution, structured conversations, and focused action.

Question 2:

In addition to targeting information that you want to receive, what are other benefits to utilizing RSS feeds?

Answer 2:

RSS feeds don’t require you to provide an email address. This means that a publisher cannot sell, or give away your contact information. This also eliminates spam, viruses, phishing, or identity theft. If you no longer want to receive content, you just remove a particular source from your feed. There is no need to request to be removed.