Some great RSS resources came across my Bloglines aggregator today, and it’s making me itch to get my school up to speed on the wonders of aggregation. First there’s TheFuss which is a wiki created by the learning object gurus north of the border who are without question way ahead of anyone else in thier thinking of how RSS might facilitate the distribution and sharing of learning objects. (And I have to tell you, when I think about how THAT might end up…sheesh. What an amazing vision.) And then there’s this cool experiment that shows away to combine a bunch of different feeds into a blogroll on a page. I’m sure there’s much more ahead.
Ironically the first call I got this morning was from a freshman English teacher who wanted to know how he could set up an e-mail list to send out homework assignments to parents…he’s been getting a lot of requests. I suggested he create a Web log and add the addresses to the notification list. That way he not only gets it online for reference and archiving, he also automatically notifies parents. Do I have to relate his reaction? Now the question is, do I broach RSS?
The possibilities here are almost limitless. If every teacher had an aggregator set up, he or she could be getting the relevant links from the tecHCentral site I’m building. And as we grow the Web log as Website, there would be more and more feeds to subscribe to. And if parents got the hang of it… I know, I’ve already dreamed this dream too many times to count. I’m just so impatient for it to become reality…and it will.
Your idea is on the mark for the call from the English teacher. It would be very do-able for him/her to describe assignments, upload documents in a blog, and thus have automatically RSS feeds.
Parents could have the choice of using RSS on their own (the few ahead of the curve), or you could set up a bookmark-able web page on your site that displays the feed contents, so all they need to do is to go to one site to see the latest information relevent to their child’s work.
It is a far step above in efficiency then pushing out attachments via email. I am on a local tirade/campaign in our organization about the amount of creative capital lost becuase we focus on mass sending documents, media via email (where it gets lost if not filed) rather than archiving/publishing in a 21st century mode.
Keep pushing the limits!
PS-One of us wiki-ers mentioned is from the far southerwestern Canadian province of Arizona (“eh, olé!” 😉
Oops! My apologies. I never was too good at geography…;0)
Thanks for all your efforts, Alan.