Stephen Downes makes the case for RSS in this Learning Circuits piece.
The benefits of RSS have not been lost on educational technologists, with the result that some early work has been done to adapt the format to educational use. In their widely regarded paper and presentation, What’s the Fuss, Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and D’Arcy Norman demonstrate the use of RSS and a feature called trackback to facilitate the distribution of learning resources to novel audiences. Trackback allows the owner of a resource to know when it has been linked to by another user, and thus helps in the propagation of learning resources through a potential audience.
RSS is also being used to support the use of Weblogs in the classroom. In the weeks preceding this article, for example, staff and students at Centre d’Apprentissage du Haut-Madawaska posted 538 public and private blog entries among them. Rather than search each student’s page individually, a teacher or administrator simply uses an RSS aggregator to capture and display the day’s most recent posts. (See http://cahm.elg.ca.)
Additionally, an RSS aggregator can be used to create a specialized community of interest. The first example of this is my own Edu_RSS, which collects about 300 feeds related to learning technology and displays them in a single location, updating the results hourly. For educational technologists with more specialized interests, Edu_RSS also organizes the incoming items into a set of about 100 specific topics. Each topic generates its own RSS feed, so a person can keep track of all developments in the field of, say, learning objects, by subscribing to this single feed. (See Edu_RSS at http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/edu_rss/edu_rss.cgi.)
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