Katkin’s weBLOG

About this time of year, our traditional mailboxes become overflowing with renewal notices for our favorite magazine subscriptions. If you’re like me, you start off wondering, “How could this be? Didn’t I just pay that subscription? How could it be up so soon?” … and then you realize, no these aren’t your annual renewal notices… these are your “free” holiday gift subscriptions!

This holiday season, subscribe to “Macleans” and give the gift of news. Subscribe to “National Geographic” and give the gift of the world. Subscribe to “The Beaver” and give the gift of history. No charge for postage. No charge for delivery. No charge for handling. No charge of any kind… and receive a free gift subscription for a friend or relative as our holiday gift …that is, if you renew your own subscription half a year in advance! Can a free gift subscription ever offer real simple syndication?

Well, maybe… As Reid Goldsborough says at the beginning of his article entitled “Personal Computing: Keeping up with RSS” – “Imagine having delivered to you just the information that you need as soon as it becomes available.”

Now doesn’t that seem like a free gift worth the subscription?

What is real simple syndication (RSS)?

Real simple syndication, or more commonly known as RSS, is a free Web 2.0 tool that allows frequent users of the Internet to manage the vast amounts of information that comes their way. RSS is particularly helpful at keeping you informed of content on the web that is constantly changing. The evolution of the Read/Write Web has seen such an increase in the content produced on the Internet, that the need to be able to effectively manage reading all your favorite blogs, news feeds and websites has become a necessity. Today many websites and most blogs have an RSS feed to which interested readers can subscribe. In order to organize what you read online using RSS, all you need to do is choose an aggregator, select the feeds that interest you, subscribe and read the content that comes directly your way. Sites where a feed is available are often indicated with RSS or XML icons.

What are blog aggregators?

A blog aggregator is a “news reader” that manages the blogs you subscribe to in one central location. It can be time consuming to visit all your favorite blogs and sites on a regular basis, looking for new information or postings. Any time there is any change to web content that you are following, your RSS reader will retrieve them and collect the new information until you are ready to read it. Even though you can download news reader programs to your computer, web-based aggregators like Google Reader and Bloglines help you stay up-to-date from any computer. Using aggregators saves time because they put you more in control of what you read and when you read it.

This week, I tried both Bloglines and Google Reader, but I chose to commit to Google Reader as my aggregator of choice. As an “edublogger,” I have also come to rely on the advice of Sue Waters at Edublog.com and she advocates the use of Google Reader. My Google Reader Account makes it easy for me to organize my feeds into folders and scan the “headlines” at a glance. I can “star” posts that I may want to return to and I can email ones I want to share. I can even designate my feeds as private or public.

One of my favorite features of the aggregator is that it takes note of what feeds I am following and it makes suggestions for new feeds, based on what it sees I’m interested in. So far, I have been very impressed with some of the choices it has been recommending for my consideration. It’s not unlike having a personal RSS shopper.

Implications for teaching and learning

Anyone who uses the Internet on a regular basis knows how difficult it can be to “tame the beast.” As web content continues to grow by leaps and bounds, our students will need to be able to manage new information using RSS subscriptions and web-based readers. In Will Richardson’s book Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms, Manitoba teacher, Clarence Fisher is quoted from his blog as saying that “an aggregator is like a personal information filter. Without it the Web is a big and scary place.” He believes that teachers must begin to see themselves as personal online guides for their students and help them to learn “to fill their aggregators with content that is relevant and useful for them.”

For educators that use student blogging as a learning tool, RSS can be a real time saver in moderating content. By simply subscribing to your students’ blogs, keeping up-to-date in reading daily content from a class or classes becomes significantly easier and more manageable.

Students might find RSS subscriptions useful when researching a topic, especially current events where the content is frequently being updated. By setting up an RSS feed to an aggregator, the information comes to the student, rather than the student having to locate that information on their own.

In an age where learning how to learn and self-directed learning are taking centre stage, using RSS feeds to gather current information has become a necessity for educators. It can even facilitate our own customized professional development plans. I can see an immediate use for RSS as a support to my personal growth plan. Sue Waters provides an excellent list of top Edubloggers (compiled by Aseem Banshah) as a means of getting started at subscribing to quality feeds.

In regards to using RSS in schools with our students, I wonder what kind of a role our divisional filter will play? We are preparing to move into Sharepoint which does use RSS feeds, but to what degree it will allow or filter outside subscriptions remains to be seen. It may be that our students and staff use RSS in our schools, but within the confines of the Sharepoint portal.

RRS technology is also surfacing within our educational databases like Ebscohost and Proquest. Database users now have the option to use RSS from within a database search. Imagine subscribing to your initial search and being updated any time a new article becomes available on the topic of your original search. In “The POWER of RSS: instant information updating based on quality searches,” author Stephen Cohen calls RSS “a hip technology” and believes that the addition of RSS feeds may help librarians in “selling” subscription databases more readily to students. Our school divisions invest substantial funds into the purchase of subscription databases, not to mention the high quality of these types of resources, therefore it is important to keep them at the forefront… and RSS can help libraries keep these types of resources within our patrons’ radar.

Revelations

At first venture into using RSS feeds, it seems rather straightforward – you want to keep track of certain blogs or sites that interest you and your reader brings that information to you by way of subscription. The revelation is that this is, but only a very small part, of the potential that is RSS. You can also subscribe to news feeds, comments to your posts or those of others, as well as view other people’s bookmarks… and it all comes right to your own front door.

In her edublog post entitled “Are you making your life easier by using RSS?“, Sue Waters states that “RSS makes your life easy but for people new to RSS, its easy to overlook it’s importance… how to use if effectively should be a priority.” She also goes on to say that it is important for users to experience RSS “first hand” to really develop an understanding how you can use it best to meet your needs. I would agree that knowing about RSS and actually using it, are two different understandings

We have all been doing a great deal of online reading this term and RSS can make this happen more efficiently. There is so much worth reading, but the feeds we choose to subscribe to are those that we value most. In the December 2007 issue of “Teacher-Librarian, Esther Rosenfeld refers to RSS subscriptions as being necessary to “staying up-to-date in the blogoshere.” She differentiates between what’s important to read online and what’s “worth reading on a regular basis” online. The latter being most worthy of our attention through RSS subscriptions.

I know that I have just scratched the surface in terms of what the potential is for using RSS feeds. It will be important to continue to pursue the possibilities and look for opportunities to incorporate them into my daily practise online. I would agree with Stephen Cohen when he makes the following observation in “The POWER of RSS: instant information updating based on quality searches” – “While not a new technology in internet terms (RSS has been around since 1997), it is one that will continue to evolve and its usuage will only increase. RSS truly is Real Simple Syndication.”