Personal Learning

Environments with NetVibes

Stan Skrabut@skrabut#UWCEShttp://www.slideshare.net/skrabut

The half-life of knowledge continues to decrease; it is important to stay current.

You are a lifelong learner just trying to stay informed.

The amount of information is overwhelming and you may have a hard time managing it.

You want an easy system to help stay abreast of new trends.

I will show you how to transform NetVibes into a personal learning environment.

The primary benefit of a

personal learning environment is the ability to organize

current information.

A PLE allows you to pull information from multiple resources.

Using RSS feeds, you can subscribe to information.

As a result, information is timely because it is updated as the originator adds it.

There are a number of different options for organizing and sharing information.

You can group information based on theme or concept or individual.

You can set up searches for information using key terms or phrases.

By making your site public, others can benefit from your information.

As with other tools, it is

important to understand the

basics of the tool – Netvibes.

There are three types of NetVibes sites: private, public, and dashboards.

Private sites are for site you do not wish to share with others.

Public sites can be created be used to share information with others.

Dashboards are a quick way to gathers feeds from multiple sites on a topic.

Setting up and adding content to your site is your key success.

Tabs provide you with the ability to group content.

There are over 190,000 widgets to help you customize your PLE.

RSS feeds are the key to getting the information you want.

Dashboards are an easy way to quickly gather information on a subject.

If a content originator wants you to subscribe to their information, they will create an RSS feed.

In most cases, it is easy to identify RSS feeds.

If you go to a RSS feed directly, it will often look like code.

There are a number of RSS

feeds that will help you stay current.

Google News searches will display current news on a subject.

Start by conducting a search at http://www.google.com/news

Go to the bottom of the page, and copy the RSS link address.

Go to Netvibes and click on “Add content.”

Next, click on “Add a feed.”

Paste in the URL for the RSS feed.

Finally, drag RSS feed widget to the content area.

Twitter search queries will help you keep up to date on ongoing conversations.

Start by conducting a search at http://search.twitter.com/

Twitter search operators will help you refine your search.

http://search.twitter.com/operators

Go to the upper right part of the page, and copy the RSS link address.

Go to Netvibes and click on “Add content.”

Next, click on “Add a feed.”

Paste in the URL for the RSS feed.

Finally, drag RSS feed widget to the content area.

By following a specific public tag, you can see all new links saved in Delicious.

First, conduct a search within delicious tags at http://delicious.com/tag/

Go to the bottom of the page, copy the RSS link address, and create a Netvibes RSS widget.

You can also create your own RSS feeds by using the formats provided on

http://delicious.com/help/json

Your library’s digital archives may provide you with RSS feed capability.

Conduct a search for your term of choice. In this case, I am search in EBSCOhost.

Click on the RSS image, copy the RSS link address, and create a Netvibes RSS widget.

You may be interested in staying up to date on the latest Youtube videos.

There is a not an easy way to copy a RSS address in Youtube, you will have to create one.

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/uwcesedtech/uploads

http://www.youtube.com/rssls provides additional RSS feed types.

If you want to see the latest photos posted on Flickr, you can also set up an RSS feed.

The easiest method I have found so far is using a RSS feed generator.

A very useful RSS generator can be found at http://www.degraeve.com/flickr-rss/

Copy the resulting URL from the address bar and create a Netvibes RSS widget.