If you are like me, you keep up with the news on a daily basis.  I like to be informed about what’s going on in the world.  I also like to keep up with other sites that report on distance education.  I’ve found that keeping up with the industry helps me to become more informed in my decisions I make about my education.

One of the best tools I found for this purpose is RSS.  What is RSS?  Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an easy and free way to get the information you want whenever it is updated. You choose what you want to track and how often you want to be updated.  To use RSS, you'll need to use a feed reader.  This is a program or interface that provides a real-time interface to the feeds you select. You can read more about RSS here.

Here’s where it gets good.  I used to use iGoogle (formerly known as the “personalized home page”).  This is a very good RSS reader.  It certainly serves its purpose.  But the other day, I was introduced to a new reader called NetVibes.  This is the Cadillac of RSS readers on the web.  The interface is far superior to any others I have seen, it has more options than I know what to do with, and it is an all-around better product.  It’s web-based, so when I open my browser, all the latest news is staring me in the face every morning.  I just click on what I want to read.  Too easy!

The good thing about this is that there are a lot of distance education sites (including the eLearners.com site you are visiting right now) that have RSS feeds.  This blog that you are reading right now and all the other blogs on this site are available through RSS.

Instead if making you find your own RSS feeds that pertain to distance education, I have set up a pre-configured tab for you to use.  I am also going to provide specific instructions on how to set this up.  This may look harder than it actually is.  Actually, it’s fairly simple.

Step 1: Go to http://www.NetVibes.com – (just by visiting this page, you will see some default feeds installed already).  Don’t worry about those.

Step 2: Click on the “Sign In” button in the upper right hand corner, then click on the “Sign Up Now” button.  Fill in your information, and click “Sign Up”.  Now you are ready to add content to your page.  

Step 3: Go to my web page where I maintain my tabs.

Step 4: Click on the “Distance Ed” icon for NetVibes, or any of the other tabs you may want.  Remember that you can delete the content later if you are not interested in it.

From here, you can set NetVibes to be your home page in your browser options.  You should play around with NetVibes for an hour or so.  It’s time well spent.  This is a great tool if you like keeping up with stuff.  There are tons of options that you will find when you play around with this.