Education Eye: an RSS reader for those who don’t feed-read…
I’m a big fan of Futurelab‘s work. I’ve used their resources, been part of their Teachers as Innovators project, and even helped Dan Sutch (legend that he is) run a Futurelab seminar at BETT.
When they launched Education Eye I didn’t really get it. Now I do. RSS feeds pulled in from blogs and news outlets (including, yes, this one) and presented in a very visual fashion. I love the way that the dots are colour-coded according to ‘inspiration’, ‘Policy’, ‘Practice’ and so-on, with certain posts starred as Futurelab staff favourites. Awesome.
I mentioned on Twitter to Dan that this would make an amazing screensaver (like the Digg ones). Turns out they’re already working on it! And not only that, but they’re working on an Event Eye, ‘an indexed, searchable, content aggregator that pulls together the best content from the web about a particular conference or event.’ Double awesome.
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PS Dan had a bit of a disaster with his Twitter account! Help him rebuild his network by following him: @dansutch
It’s good they are working on it as an open source project 🙂
RSS Voyage and an RSS feed do something very similar but with a focus on ICT in Education.
RSS Voyage: http://rssvoyage.com
RSS feed: http://mclear.co.uk/2010/03/28/aggregated-rss-feed-of-primary-school-ict-leaders/
I have to admit, I’m not a fan of the wasted pixel space but I’m a code monkey, all I see is text.
Thanks for the heads-up John 🙂
We’ve been talking to futurelab and got to see more of Education Eye and Event Eye on our visit this week, very interesting stuff and was very impressed with Dan’s approach.
Thanks for the link John to RSS Voyage- it is elegant, though I prefer to read full feeds and not headlines in my reader. I’m wondering if this sort of visualization will play out agains the magazine style we are seeing in things like Flipboard (on iPad) and paper.li
It’s just me, but I;ve never been sure if the flying, 3D interfaces are efficient to process a stream of data. I do love them, and RSS Voyage does work great.
Horses for courses – I see Education Eye as augmenting my RSS reading, not replacing it. For others it may be an introduction and, as I said above, it would make an awesome screensaver… 🙂
Thanks for the post Doug. To me, the value of Education Eye isn’t just the feed aggregator (although the ‘mediation’ of the world of feeds is useful) – it’s the huge amount of indexing that goes on behind the scenes to make those posts more searchable and connected (that includes the colours you like!). I use #edeye to search for themes I’m particularly interested in (for example STEM at the moment) and I can visually sift through a huge amount of mediated sites when those results are returned.
I could talk for hours about this but I’m back off to build my Twitter links (thanks for the painful, but important reminder of the untimely demise of @Dannno and the birth of @dansutch 🙂
Thanks for helping bring this to us, Dan – and keep up the good work! 🙂
Event Eye would be great, I already use Education Eye a lot and that would be another great visual way of finding stuff out.