http://google.com/reader
RSS feeds create a new orientation for the web: rather than being somwhere you visit, the web becomes a stream of information that comes to you. More than any application, RSS and its adoption as a way of managing information flow (especially on sites whose purpose requires them to change regularly) has made the Internet something like the knowledge ‘assistant’ that ideally it should be
The basics
RSS feeds take the content of websites, normally material that has been recently added, and delivers a summary / headline via the feed to a reader (such as Google Reader). This ‘syndication’ of a website’s contents therefore means one can keep up to date with topics, or sites, without actually visiting them: just use the reader. Users can both search specifically for feeds, or they can (at a website they wish to monitor) find the RSS code there and tie it to their feed reader.
Pedagogic Challenge
Despite the fact RSS is widely used – and Google is a standard form for using it, educators have not paid as much attention to it as many other applications. Indeed. RSS feeds can be tricky to integrate into teaching. RSS changes the way we use and consume information — yet many of the structures within which we do that work have not changed. Thus, the underlying idea of an RSS feed doesn’t fit well with the way most people teach and learn at university where the information is provided for them (mostly) by teachers, or is sourced from scholarly journals which do not really need RSS to function well.
Perhaps the answer lies in using RSS in ways other than its intended purpose (to filter and deliver information as it changes, rather than for information to wait until it is searched out). Rather than getting students to use RSS to get information delivered to them from various websites, perhaps RSS could be a form of ‘flowing lecture’ where a blog, maintained by the lecturer, feeds the information out to students, reducing information to smaller, more regular ‘bites’. Of course, students may be challenged by the ‘constant flow’ of information, nevertheless.
RSS probably has its greatest power in aggregating the work of students themselves: rather than reading 20 different student blogs a lecturer can get feeds from those blogs and read them en masse, only when they are updated. They can also easily sense which students are attending to the task and which are not.
Alternatives
The floating, elegantly timelined Voyage is one alternative though it may well be more eye-candy than practical application. RSSCompendium has a comprehensive list of readers (as well as an enormous amount of other information about RSS).
Read…
The Feedforall website has an excellent educational section
McManus, R. 2010. 5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock. ReadWriteWeb blog/em>.
