May
07

RSS injects edu with accuracy, freshness, and cool stuff

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wildlifemap.jpg

The Wildlife Disease Information Node in the image with this post came to my attention through the RSS (really simple syndication) feed from the USGS (United States Geological Survey). By subscribing to the USGS Newsroom feed, I get a headline linked to each news story from the science being done and observed at this major earth sciences institution. As the story from the image shows, the science that can be delivered is real, fresh, and something unlikely to reach a classroom or school lab through print. The subject in this illustration is turtle cancer in Trinidad and Tabago, reported in April 2008. The interactive map is definite cool stuff technically, but is also a superb tool for biological studies.

The potential of RSS is only beginning to be glimpsed across all Net sectors. In promoting the use of RSS for as a public relations tool for online commerce, one of the top firms in online marketing observes:

Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if that number were 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, says Daily Blog Tips.

RSS is a Web 2.0 tool that educators can use to grab fresh learning content. It is also a way that creators of educational resources can spread the word about their materials, as open educational resources MIT Open Courseware is already doing.


Filed under Findability on May 7, 2008 -

4 Responses to “RSS injects edu with accuracy, freshness, and cool stuff”



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  1. scott lewis Says:
    May 8th, 2008 at 8:25 pm

    Another possible use of RSS in education is to use it communicate web “trails”, a sequence of websites visited during research. This idea actually goes back to Vannebar Bush in the 1940s, and was one of the inspiration for Douglas Engelbart’s work at http://www.bootstrap.org. I’ve developed some software that, among other things, makes producing these “trails” fairly easy to do. It’s called Xenos, and you can download a beta copy from my website here.

  2. Judy Breck Says:
    May 23rd, 2008 at 4:57 am

    Thank you Scott. Very interesting! Adding these principles into the education tools has huge potential for improving learning.

  3. Tony Hirst Says:
    May 23rd, 2008 at 10:21 am

    MIT are only making feeds available of links to MIT courses. The OpenLearn OER site from the Open University actually makes the course content available as RSS feeds - http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/index.php

    If you want to see what MIT courses might look like if they were made available via a feed, I have a demo here: http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/012453.html

    I also did a demo using Yale content, but they have changed their content URLs, and my screenscrapers also appear to have rotted.

    I’ve also posted about how course material authored in a blog is self-disaggregating via RSS feeds - http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/013966.html

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