Question:  What levels have you tried RSS feeds with?

Answer:  My courses are mostly juniors, seniors, and graduate students, so I have not tried the learning community with RSS feeds on underclassmen.  I have found, however, that the lower the level, the more reluctant they are to begin participation.  Once they begin, however, it seems that all levels participate about equally.  You might not want to start your community to be as complicated as mine.  Certainly, this is a technology that lends itself to easy configuration for your setting.

Question:  What if I can't set up my own blogs and wikis because we are not allowed to install such things on our system?

Answer:  Start them out as a community by introducing them to the aggregators (readers) and give them a list of sites to subscribe to.  If they have their own blogs and they want people to have access to them, they can share those addresses so others can subscribe.  Everyone can download and use an RSS reader.  Secondly, setting up a feed does not require that you set up your own server software, but it does require that your students have access to web space where they can upload their feeds (xml files).  If this is a limitation on your campus, you might try "renting" some web space from a commercial provider and setting up an area for your students to upload files.  This can be done fairly inexpensively (less than $10 per month).

Question:  What if all our software is behind a firewall and can't be made Internet-accessible?

Answer:  You have three choices here:  You can run your community on your intranet (that which is behind your firewall) and make them access it from on-campus (i.e. inside the firewall) locations.  Second, you could find blog and wiki sites that are open to the public and set something up there.  Third, you could use a combination of these two techniques.  Again, this is so configurable that should always be some option you can use.

Question:  Can I try out FeedForAll without buying it?

Answer:  Yes, it has a 30-day trial.  You can download it and try it for 30 days, so that might allow you to try out a collaboration without having to worry about licensing, so long as your project is short-term.

Question:  How do I get ahold of a freeware or open source feed generator?

Answer:  ListGarden is a package that gets decent reviews, but I have not personally used it.