Hi, my name is Greg, and I’m a blog addict.

I admit it. I check the feeds of the blogs I subscribe to in Google Reader before I hop in the shower in the mornings. At lunchtime, you’ll find me sitting at my desk, sandwich in hand, scrolling through the morning’s posts and spamming my colleagues with forwarded tidbits that I’ve gleaned from my mid-day dose. And usually at some point in the late afternoon, as the meetings and decisions and deliverables wear me down, stepping away from it all to check the blogs again usually nets me some new idea that gives me a rush, reminds me why I love the field of educational technology, and energizes me enough to get me through the rest of the day.

So this time around, I’ve decided to share a list of some of the educational technology blogs that make up part of my daily fix. What follows, in no particular order, are twenty of the best education blogs as judged by . . . well, me. It’s a totally subjective list and it’s by no means exhaustive, but all of these authors post regularly and all of them have introduced me to great new ideas at one point or another. But if you should get hooked yourself, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m happy to announce (if you haven’t already seen the press release or received the email announcement, that is), that my team, the Blackboard Beyond Initiative, rolled out a batch of new features for Scholar. These features focus on around enhanced profiles, user search, and social networking capabilities.

You know, when we first launched Scholar we talked about it as a social bookmarking application. And that’s not inaccurate — Scholar is a social bookmarking application. However, after we launched, I realized that "social bookmarking" isn’t a term that’s meaningful to most Blackboard users. Some informal, non-scientific surveys conducted by a few of our client institutions even indicated that only a few percent of their student users on campus were familiar with social bookmarking as a concept or with social bookmarking applications.

I probably shouldn’t write this blog post, because I’m talking about a book I actually haven’t read yet. However, not being fully qualified to talk about a topic has never stopped me before . . . as co-workers, family, friends, and the occasional random stranger are likely to confirm. In fact, "not being qualified" is sort of the point of this post.

One of the debates making the rounds on education blogs (and blogs in general) this week stems from Andrew Keen‘s recently released book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture. The basic premise of Keen’s book seems to be that Web 2.0, especially when applied to media, is robbing us of our culture and replacing it with rampant amateurism.

Okay, so this post is probably better named "Scholar Tip #1" since I have never posted any Scholar tips before. But there are way more than 272 of them. I just gotta find the time to write them all up! Anyway . . .

Tip #272: Just about every view in Scholar is available through RSS?

If you’re reading blogs, RSS probably isn’t a new concept to you. If you need an RSS refresher, though, check out this fun intro video called RSS in Plain English to get up to speed, and then peruse some of the other RSS resources bookmarked in Scholar. 

When you’re looking at any set of bookmarks in Scholar — like, say, the bookmarks of Greg Ritter or a search for all bookmarks tagged mashup — you’ll notice a funky little orange icon in the title bar of the view. It looks like this:

That’s the standard icon for an RSS feed. Yeah, orange is the standard color. Doesn’t really go well with that green background, does it? Makes me think of certain teams, when my loyalties lie elsewhere. Note to self: have the UI designer change the color from green to maroon.

What you see when you click on an RSS icon depends on what browser you’re using. If you’re using a contemporary browser, like Firefox 2, Safari 2, or Internet Explorer 7 you’ll see basically the same content, nicely formatted. If you’re using an older browser, you might just see the raw XML. In any event, the RSS feed is the content from that page formatted in a standard way that other websites or tools can deal with.

So why do you care? Because having Scholar views available as RSS feeds means that you can use the URL for that feed to include content from Scholar is lots of other places. Let’s look at a few examples.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Lanny Arvan discovered Educate/Innovate just recently via the latest WebCT Newsletter. Lanny wrote up his thoughts about Educate/Innovate on his own blog, Lanny on Learning Technology. He’s got some good things to say about Educate/Innovate, some questions, and some critiques. In fact, his post got forwarded around to a number of Blackboard staff and execs over the weekend. I thought it would be worthwhile to address some of his questions here, since I’m guessing a bunch of our readers have similar questions on their minds.