Application
Tools and Links for
Further Learning
RSS is an acronym that stands for really simple syndication (it was originally called, in its early versions, rich site summary). Essentially, it is a technology that allows for collaboration on a "pull," rather than a "push," basis.
An RSS network
consists of three major components:
A
(large) number of content providers, each providing news
articles, and each providing their own RSS files describing
these news articles. In this model, both students and
faculty would be content providers, as well as the wealth of
other content providers already available on the Internet.
A (smaller)
number of RSS aggregators that read these RSS files from
multiple sources, collect them into an index, and provide
customized “feeds” of topic-specific news headlines from
this index. Our
learning community server would perform some of this
aggregation activity, but it would also be carried out on a
smaller scale by individual desktop applications.
A (large) number of news viewing applications that, based on user input, connect to an RSS aggregator, access a news feed, and display it to the reader. On viewing the news feed, the reader can then select a news item (by clicking on the headline) and read the article directly from the content provider. This negates the need for the content consumer to have to check email, log on to WebCT, or check a variety of websites for updated information. Configurable filtering means that the consumer is the ultimate determiner of the content received. This provides the benefits of push technologies with the security of pull technologies.
All
participants in the learning community will be content providers
as well as content consumers.
Channel
Properties – the name
of the channel, a home URL for the channel, and an image for the
channel.
Item
Properties – the
separate news items listed in the channel. Each item has a
headline and a URL. In some cases, an item will also contain a
short summary, a publication date, author information, and more.
The software
to create content and put it onto RSS channels is easy to learn
and use, and all learning community participants will be
expected to place content into RSS channels.
Students participating in RSS-facilitated learning
communities will be equally adept at creating and moving content
and filtering and receiving information.
This new communication paradigm will also alter
participant thinking on how communication takes place and allow
them to view information from a new perspective.
When you view the RSS communicative technologies from a learning community perspective, it looks like this:
Clearly, many types of hardware, software, and activities can be
combined for participation in an RSS-based learning community.
The key to the system is the critical RSS technology that allows
for syndication and aggregation of content.
Top
Introduction
Tools and Links
for Further Learning
RSS forms the basis for a number of related technologies that can be used in the classroom. This diagram illustrates the hierarchy of collaborative technologies that can be used in a learning community. Note that RSS forms the foundation for several of them:
You will note that the foundation for all of these collaborative technologies is TCP/IP, the set of internetworking protocols that are used in the Internet. The fundamental building blocks that lay on top of TCP/IP are XML and Database. The common collaborative tools of wikis, blogs, podcasts, and vodcasts, are all built upon the RSS and/or database foundations.
The primary advantage of RSS technologies in collaboration is the ability of RSS syndication to act as a pull technology, i.e. one in which the content consumer directly selects the content that is desired. Furthermore, the RSS feed allows the acquisition and consumption of that content to be automated, a process known as aggregation. If you consider the impact of such technologies in the classroom, you will find that if each student has an aggregator (RSS feed reader), appropriately subscribed to the content feeds that the student desires, the student will have an automated system of keeping up to date with all of the desired content feeds with virtually no additional effort on the part of the student.
For example, let's say you have a classroom of 20 students. You want each student to contribute to the learning community by setting up a web page and then keeping current information on the website. Conceivably, content on that site could be changed several times per week. Since you want each student to look at the content added by other students, and you want them to do this on a daily basis, it will require that each student have a "favorite" for each of the other students' websites and that the student, further, manually check each of these sites (19 of them) each day. This requires a conscious effort on the part of the student, not only to access the sites, but to determine which content on those sites has been previously viewed and which is new.
Using an RSS reader in the same scenario, if each student set up a feed or blog instead of a static website, and gave each other student the url to his/her feed, then the other students would simply need to subscribe their reader to that feed (a one-time procedure). The reader would then automatically check each feed at prescribed intervals (usually hourly) and retrieve new content directly to the reader. It would also let the student distinguish automatically between new content and previously viewed content. The reduction of effort on the part of the student makes it much easier for students to obtain content effortlessly and allows them to concentrate on the content itself, rather than the process of obtaining and managing the content.
The following table shows the various collaborative tools mentioned in this article and whether or not they can be used in conjunction with RSS syndication and collaboration:
|
Technology |
RSS-capable |
Notes |
|
RSS Feeds |
YES |
|
|
Blogs |
YES |
Each post will be a feed item |
|
Wikis |
YES |
Using a wiki with an RSS feed can create a feed item each time an entry is edited or added |
|
Forums |
YES |
Using a forum with an RSS feed can create a feed item each time a new entry is posted to the forum. Some forums create a feed for each discussion thread, while others will consider the entire forum a feed with each discussion entry an item, no matter what its thread. |