Finding Information

Over at the Educated Reporter, Linda Perlstein has a great post* on resources that any new education reporter should use to help familiarize themselves with the beat.

I’m not going to duplicate what Linda has over there, but add one more important thing that I think is absolutely crucial for anyone who wants to follow or read about education policy: use an RSS reader.

For those who aren’t familiar with RSS, it provides a feed of all the stories posted on a site. In most cases, such as this blog, it collects the entire text all there in one place. For publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ed Week, or Inside Higher Ed, it collects either the title or the first few lines with an easy link to read the whole thing.

But the best thing about an RSS feed is when you put it into a free program like Google Reader. Any new content published on that feed is updated instantaneously. And it catches basically everything. If you subscribe to the Quick and the Ed feed, for example, you don’t have to worry about checking back multiple times a day waiting with bated breath to see if one of us has put up new amazing content. It’s right there in your reader seconds after one of us hits publish.

Google Reader also lets you set it so that after you finish reading something it disappears–there’s no trying to remember what you did or didn’t see. You can search the feed to find older posts you vaguely remember. And if you really like something, you can add a star to remember it for later or e-mail it to a friend, all in one window.

The biggest advantage of program’s like Google Reader, though, is that you can combine multiple feeds into a single folder. For example, I’ve got one labeled “Education,” so when I come in the morning I’ve got all the fresh content from all the major education publications plus a number of blogs all right there in one place. Even some unexpected sources have RSS feeds. The Information for Financial Aid Professionals (IFAP) web site has one that updates all the new dear colleague letters and technical manuals released. Congressional committees have ones for their press releases. So does the Congressional Budget Office. Simply put, with an RSS reader you can consume greater amounts of information from a wider variety of sources in less time since you don’t have to click around.

But of course what you are reading still matters. In that light and in the interest of sharing, here’s a list of the education feeds in my RSS reader. This list tends to skew toward higher education, but it’s by no means complete. If you regularly read a blog or publication that isn’t on there and think it’s worth checking out, please list it in the comments.

Bolded names only have a partial RSS.

Brainstorm (Chronicle of Higher Education Blog)

CAP Education

Center for College Affordability and Productivity

The Choice

Chronicle of Higher Education