Thank goodness Alan isn’t blogged out yet. This is a great primer for understanding and using RSS. And it’s a work that makes me numb with all of the possibilities here. I feel like I need about a week to diagram all of the connections that could be created with RSS just on our Web site. Yikes. It’s a lot for newbies to handle, despite Alan’s and others’ best efforts, in fact there are a lot of the same issues as Web logs in terms of adoption. The technology doesn’t have a widespread audience yet. RSS and XML and code and all that other stuff make it scary for most (although I think I read recently that there is a rename the RSS contest going on…) And while there are a lot of cool uses already in practice out there, I need to really put together some more ed related ones.
I think the one place to start is in student and teacher research. My journalism kids have actually been using their Bloglines accounts pretty actively. And I think that is what has been driving some of the better blogs that my students have been creating. What I really need to do is show some teachers how they can use it to keep up with their own areas of interest.
I’m hoping that when we get all of the kinks figured out with the Website that it will generate some more interest when people here see what this can do…
Yes, there is a “rename RSS” contest happening — I’m running it through my weblog, CONTENTIOUS.
Details: http://blog.contentious.com/contest.html
– Amy Gahran