So my little experiment with bringing research to my students through RSS is meeting with mixed results. Aside from some technical glitches, the biggest problem is tweaking the search feed to get the desired result, which I guess is pretty standard procedure anyway. Some of my students have had quite a bit of success. Others are struggling with it. I’m wondering how to make it better.
I’m also wondering what it might look like on a larger scale. A couple of people graciously sent me the link to the complete article I referenced yesterday, and I found a some more interesting nuggets:
“Students live on the Web today,” Mr. Trumble says. “They don’t look for a paper. They don’t go looking to find information. They want information brought to them.”
Brian Koranda, a Web designer and producer at Carleton, uses the RSS feed to send out notices to the institution’s alumni magazine and to provide students with a variety of information, including listings of campus events and movies at the local theater.
“It allows you to see a lot of updated information all at one time,” he says. “It’s only going to get bigger in the future.”
Yeah. But see, as I said yesterday, I want this here, and I want it now. I want teachers to be able to check a box and recieve news of the world and school and student assignments and whatever else right to their portals. I want students to be able to check a box and get homework assignments, sports scores, search feeds, movie listings and lunch menus right to their portals. I want parents to be able to get their children’s work, board of education news etc. right to their portals on our server.
Right now, I know how to generate/or find the content in feedable form. What I don’t know is how to make that content show up on an easily created (kind of just sign up, check a box, set it as your homepage,) portal-type page where you can find and check those boxes and have that content appear. Obviously it’s being done. Any and all guidance appreciated…
This is a Manila-specific question, right?