My good friend and fellow edublogger, Bill Ferriter, is hosting a Voicethread discussion with Rick and Becky DuFour around their newest book “Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap: Whatever It Takes”.  The conversation takes place May 19-21, so there’s plenty of time to pick up a copy of the book and join me and many other education folks on Voicethread.

You can find out more on Bill’s blog, The Tempered Radical, by clicking here.

Hi, my name is Paul, and I am a news junkie.

While some of my fellow bloggers admit to vices that range from reality TV to quilting, my fix is an order of magnitude more boring.  I just love learning about the major news stories of the day.  I have no real fascination with weather or sports, but national and international news bits are like candy to me.  That’s one reason why I’ve written on several previous occasions about the ways I use RSS (and Google Reader/Reeder on my iPhone) to “feed the beast”.

My nearly insatiable desire for more news led me to NPR as my primary daily source.  I find its reporting to be both more informed and more unbiased than most.  They don’t get dragged into sensationalism, and they treat their audience like the educated and rational folks that we mainly are.  In short, I respect them because they respect me.  And, through my avid public radio listening I was introduced to the Planet Money podcast.

I’m not an economist and I don’t have the money skills to ever invest wisely, but I thoroughly enjoy the writing and style of the show.  I listen every week while I plan my lessons.  Now, I can make sense of the seemingly endless flow of bad news from the media about the financial situation we find ourselves in.

And, so it was that I recently heard an episode of Planet Money in which the economics of the music industry was discussed.  One of the people interviewed was Damian Kulash, lead singer of the alternative band OK Go.  To learn more about the band, I highly recommend this bio written by Ira Glass.

Thus, in one of the strangest lines of reasoning and coincidence ever, we get from a news addiction to one of my favorite bands.  If none of this has made any sense to you, I would like to blame it on blogger fatigue and simply leave you with this, a great example of OK Go’s fun and entertaining music videos.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

I’ve made no mystery of my love for RSS and my dismay over its slow adoption by the masses.  I do most of my reading in a given week by means of my feedreader, and it is how I satisfy my inner news junkie.  I find myself trusting mainstream news sources less and less as their biases become more apparent and their propensity toward sensationalism becomes more irritating.  I prefer do-it-yourself news aggregation, especially when I can read it on my portable device of choice: my iPhone.

A couple of years ago, I purchased Byline to read my RSS feeds on my iPhone.  I liked that it syncs to Google Reader so that anything I read on the mobile device is marked read online.  It’s basic features met my needs at the time, especially since I considered my news habit to be very personal.  It was (as most things in my life seem to be) all about me.

In the months that have followed, my PLN has grown and matured and I now appreciate the social potential of RSS feeds.  We all follow some of the same news sources, but our individual interests and experiences (mine are comic books and marine sciences) lead us to read different things.  I make use of Google Reader’s sharing features much more now to pass along and comment on news that I discover.

And so, this week I went searching for a new iPhone app to access and share my RSS feeds.  After some research and suggestions from friends, I discovered Reeder.  I couldn’t be more impressed with an application.  It has all of the visual goodies of my preferred Twitter client, Tweetie, with all of the RSS reading/sharing features I would ever want. Read more »