Friday, June 20, 2003

RSS and News Readers for Education I'm reposting this article from The Technology Sources (via weblogged News) because I want to use it with instructors at Eastern Oregon University to assist in their use of blogs in the classroom. The author, Mary Harrsch, provides an easy-to-follow introduction to the world of RSS and News Aggregators. JH ____ RSS as Killer Educational App. It's good to see more and more people thinking about the use of RSS in an educational setting...whenever I start picturing the way it could enhance communication here I get seriously impatient to start work on building it right away. Frankly, as I have said many times before, I think the potential is enormous. But there are some issues that need to be resolved, the primary one being the best way to deliver the content to teacher/student desktops. I'm sure there are many more well versed than I that could speak to what that might look like. I would think the easiest way would be to create a menu of all the local RSS feeds available from which each user could select relevant topics. But I'm thinking that it might be easier if the feeds dumped right into e-mail rather than a separate reader application. Everyone checks his/her e-mail (just about). Not everyone, I fear, would check out the aggregator. Also, if we used a non-Web based aggregator, the only aggregation happening would be at school as I doubt more than a handful of users would install a second version on a home computer. I know there were some attempts to include RSS feeds into e-mail being discussed a while back (yeah, I can understand that ;). And I did find a hack for Amphetadesk. I guess that no matter what we'd still have to have some type of separate aggregation software pumping all the stuff to our e-mail boxes. Anyone have any other ideas on this? [weblogged News] 10:53:03 AM    COMMENT []