How to Follow the Course

By Stephen Downes
Oct 06, 2021
Transcript of How to Follow the Course

Autranslated by Google Pixel Recorder - Not yet edited

Okay. Welcome everyone. It's 12 noon and I'm afraid I tried to quickly eat an egg sandwich before I started. So now I have the hiccups. Hey proud, my apologies for that. So you may hear hiccuping sounds as I do. This short talk presentation, so if you're watching, I'm watching the comments.

If you're watching on YouTube, I'm watching the YouTube comments and already got one from Tyler and it's, well, I'll be watching the comments in the activity center where you can also be watching this and the activity center of course, is right here. And to put on that, there it is.

Live of just leave it off so that I don't get echoing but you can just access this stream in the activity center. Of course, if you're already here, you know that already anyhow this channel want to cover, how to follow the course. Now, if you're already subscribed to email, I'm just going to come back here.

No, not there. Here we go. Your furnished subscribed by email. Then of course you can just follow the course through your email newsletter but maybe you don't want to use email. Maybe you want an alternative to email or maybe just like different ways of following the same thing any other way.

That's fine. There are many different ways you can follow the course. And I'm going to talk about those in this session. So the newsletter of course, be click on the course newsletter, and then click on this link here to subscribe. It'll take you to a subscription form. You fill in the form.

All I really need is the email address. First name last name is completely optional and then you need to check. Email to give me GDPR permissions to send you email. And then just click subscribe, you'll get a confirmation in your email and your subscribed. This is a mailing list that you can unsubscribe to at any time.

There's a link at the bottom of every email and all you need to do is click on unsubscribe and you're gone, so that's email. And again, I think most of you probably already know that but that's come back. There's also course feeds. So, the course feed,

Risk be seen here. So in this feed, what I do is I harvest other people's feeds and including my own where I may contribute to my own information and you can subscribe to the course feed in our SS itself. In fact I don't think to have a page for that.

That's interesting often make a page for that. Oh my, let's go to the course newsletter again. Here we go. I shouldn't mention the newsletter is available on the web. I'm here it is. It's just ethics. Dot move.ca. Slash course newsletter.htm and it's also available via RSS that really should make this more prominent here.

So this is the course RSS feed this feed. We can see it here. It's updated every day. Actually, it's updated every hour and it contains the posts that you the participants in the course. Have contributed via your blog and we talk yesterday about how to contribute your blog to the course, plus any presentations for example, this presentation would be available and accessible through the RSS feed.

And then the other course materials, there's a bunch of different materials that may be offered will be offered. In fact as we go through the course and they will all be made available through this RSSP. So the question is, how to subscribe to it? Well, what's you need is an RSS reader so I'll just type in Google RSS reader.

There are various readers. Okay. Here are the best. Free RSS. Reader apps and 2021 according to zapier. Let's see what once they recommend. Feedly news blur. I know reader the old reader and feeder. So, feedly is the one that I use personally, so I'll click on feedly. So actually, I'll click on feedly using a browser that where I'm not currently subscribed to freely, so you can get a sense of what that looks like.

Feedly and so here's what it looks like. Oh I am subscribed and how about that? Okay, hello internet explorer. I'm really not. I don't use internet explorer for a while. I don't even have it loaded here chrome. Let's try. I might be subscribed here as well, but we'll see.

So feedly same URL. Okay I'm still subscribed. Okay, let me let me log out here and we'll see what it looks like. When you first sign in, by can log out about chrome, so I don't know how to do anything. Here we go. Down here logo. All right, this is what feedly looks like.

When you just go to it to begin with and then you just click on get started, you can create a free, feedly account, they are free and either continue with Google, feedly with that year. You know, if you don't have an account, I don't know how you can continue with feedly or continue with Apple or choose other ways to sign up and adult offers away to that's with your Microsoft account.

What I'm looking for is the latest sign up without actually. There we go. Just enter your email address and then you'll create a password and you can sign in. So feed me looks like this. This is my feedly to add an RSS feed to feedly. You click on the plus.

On the left hand side of the page here. So click on that. I know it's come back to the course, which is here somewhere.

Okay, this is the RSS so I could either copy the address from the top or from this course. Newsletter page. I can just wait click where it says RSS and go copy link or I could just enter the URL for the course itself. We come back into, feedly just submit it and you'll see the source that comes up and click subscribe.

Here it is. And it gives you the option to follow, and you now have an option to put it in one of your categories. I'll just put it in favorites because it is my favorite and you are now subscribed. So what happens then is, as new content is added to the RSS feed.

We can look at that RSS feed here. So here I am in favorites. I'll just get this as actually too hard for me to work when the text is hard. So I actually have 42 favorites. I'm just trying to list from all our. It'll be down at the bottom here.

Probably. There it is. So here's the feed. Notice you can easily see the course icon. So we click on that and here is the item from yesterday. How do I add your blog to the course? Here's the post that Matthias Melcher wrote yesterday here is another piece of information.

Here's another post that someone else has already written. Here's the session. For the course, you can watch the video anything you want in. The course would be available. We all reader. So another one that I've used it works very much the same way click Addis subscription, again the same URL paste that in in this case click plus and now I'm simply simply subscribe to it.

And here we are. You can add your own neuron content. Metallurgist male shirt was already submitted stuff. He has and ask tool that he uses on his laptop. It's called quite ISS so you can download it and install it. So I'll download it here. Just use the installer for the windows and so we'll save it.

Now should be here. There it is. So I'll set it up. So now I'm installing quite RSS on my desktop. I'm doing this in real time so that you can actually see this happening install because it is very quick to do this thing. And I have here, it opened up for me automatically.

Now, here's my desktop RSS, reader solution, not even an account, no tracking or anything like that. So if I want to add a new feed,

Here's the URL. It actually remembers it from my clipboard. That's pretty cool. There's no authentication required for this feed. I'll click next and it'll go in all feeds all finish and here it is. So now and this application, this desktop application, I can read all the contents of the course.

And of course follow the links and see and I have actually displays right in the feed reader. Isn't that nice? So you don't even need to use a cloud-based service. You can use this desktop application to access all the contents of the course through our SS one more thing to add to this and that's another way of following the content of the course.

So we'll come back to the course and that's through. The course podcast. Yes. There is a course podcast. Of course, there is the podcast. Oh, I need to update this pay. Well, let's go to the course outline. And the podcast is listed here, right? Under videos. We'll click on that.

So this is the, the web page for the podcast. And each one of these, each entry, each episode, if you will, is listed here. Now, right now the podcast, only includes one presentation and it's the presentation from yesterday. Here it is. Tomorrow, it'll have two. It'll have the presentation you're listening to right now.

Plus the one from yesterday. Now the thing about podcasts is there is an RSS feed for podcasts and there it is. So this is the RSS feed for podcasts and the way podcasts work is they look for a fall in what's called an enclosure right in here in the RSSP.

So then the way you subscribe to a podcast is we'll find or find our favorite podcast application. Okay, podcast app. So Google podcast apps on Google Play and all that won't help me. Mostly people use their mobile phones for podcasts. I wonder if I can just do that really quickly.

Don't even wear mobile connect and dashboard mirroring. See your phone screen on your PC. Send request. Okay. Activate. Whoops. Activate. I need to send. There's a, let's see. Now, I need to, I'm trying to open it up on my phone and we go.

Okay, send request here. We'll start now. There we go. All right. So, now we're looking at my mobile phone screen. Sorry, I've hope that delayed in putting that up there, so I use personally, I use pocket podcasters. You can see some of the things that I subscribe to tweet and verge cast, and front burner, and much of things.

So, if I want to add a new podcast,

Actual podcasts should be able to just add it. No, I saw it. Discover search podcasts and they just have their own list of podcasts. There's there's going to be a way for me to enter in the URL. I'm sure I just don't know what it is.

Organelle. No. What's this? The hope. Okay. Well, this is the panels of doing unrehearsed things on live television, because there should be, the problem is it's hard for me to see behind that screen sharing icon there.

Okay, no. Okay, here we go. All that's cast to. So, I could cast it to my television or something like that.

Well, I'm sorry. I don't know how to do it with this application. I thought there was a way, but I apparently, there isn't. So, let's find another podcast application on Google Play because I use Android use iPhone, use your own applications. I can't help you. So, we use Google Play.

And we'll look for podcast.

So there we go and we'll look for podcast players podcast apps. So installed this, this is cast box. That was an ads. Maybe I should use that podcast player. Here we go. This looks good. So install it. And okay, well we're still installing it hoping okay. So here we are in the app and we'll go through some garbage will allow it because otherwise it can't actually access.

What can be the region? That's not good. Subscribed plus. Okay and URL. See it at the bottom. There's kind of hard to see add. You are all and we have to wait for it here. Thinking it's thinking, come on.

Okay, add you are L. There we go. Okay, so now I have the URL here. The URL for the podcast for this course come back here is ethics. I'll type that in asex dot monk dot. Ca slash audio dot xml. Confirm URL is incorrect. It must want an HTTP at the front.

HTTPS. That's right. Everything everything is HTTPS these days. So there we go. Oops, we're not seeing that anymore. So, here we go. Confirm.

Stop saying you are always incorrect.

And that is very strange, Inferno.

Yeah, unable to control your phone from your PC. That's probably good thing.

Okay. This is turning out to be a failure. It should work. It's a perfectly. Good podcast. Okay here we go. Okay so it finished doing that. Let's see if it shows up here.

And it did not.

Okay, well, I'm gonna and that attempt at the moment that was a failure, but this should work with your podcast. I will say it's getting harder and harder to simply, subscribe to podcasts, using RSS these days, but that is the podcast. You are all and in an upcoming episode of Essex analytics in the duty of care.

I will show you a successful subscription to a podcast, just to save that it can be done. However, I seem to be having issues right now and it's in the middle of a live broadcast, so it's too hard to face. So, I'm sorry about that. However, well I do have one viewer, so to the one viewer, my apologies for that.

Nonetheless the RSS. We saw that work and the newsletter we know that that works so those are other ways that you can follow this course. So with that along this session, at this point, I'm trying to keep these sessions. At least the introduction ones, relatively short and tomorrow Thursday, we'll talk about tasks and other ways of participating in the course.

And then Friday, we'll talk about. Well, we'll have our first live session using zoom, who knows how to go wrong. We'll see, should work solving tested, so should work, but you never know. Well, and we'll talk about what does it mean to participate in a connectivist book as opposed to one of the ones you may have seen in Corsair or at X or whatever?

Whereas just like, in university course, except online, connectivist moves are a bit different. So, this session right now, and thank you for your time and and you're interested, talk to you again.

Force:yes