My new "textbook"

One of my delights as an undergrad was the twice annual visit to the campus bookstore to buy my texts. My fellow English majors probably have similar fond memories: armloads of paperbacks with a few Norton anthologies thrown in for good measure. As a financial aid recipient, my checking account was always fat at the beginning of each new semester, and money seemed to be no object as I piled blue books, spiral-topped notebooks, and highlighters onto the checkout counter along with the semester's readings.

Now, as a graduate student with a kid and a mortgage, the book-buying ritual isn't nearly as fun, but thanks to a recent post at Weblogg-ed, I have a new way of thinking about my required reading for this semester and beyond.

To borrow Will Richardson's metaphor, one of my "textbooks" this fall will be my RSS aggregator.

As described in my previous post, I will soon begin an independent study on best practices for computer-mediated, peer-to-peer mentoring for new and novice teachers. In addition to poring over traditional, "scholarly" resources, I plan to use RSS to channel the best-of-the-best blog posts on the subject. The aggregate is indeed a text to be studied, with the added benefits of being totally topical, customizable, and (the best part) free.

This means tweaking my RSS aggregator to regain some much needed focus. I'm in the process of dropping some feeds (if only temporarily) to make room for others that may be more fruitful.

For example, I've recently added subscriptions to blogs by Christopher D. Sessums and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach.

Who/what am I missing?

technorati tags: RSS blogs mentoring research web2.0 professional development