rss feeds

I had a  conversation with Lisa Featherstone of JISC TechDis recently about RSS feeds and podcasts and the fact that although those of us who know about them and use them think the technology is the bees' knees, chances are your neighbour on the street doesn't understand it. They don't know how it can enrich their lives. How did we get to the point where the RSS logo is everywhere, but so few people use the technology? We didn't have that problem with email, did we?
Maybe it's to do with RSS readers. Browsers are a way into the web, we all know that, but even then, most people don't know their Firefoxes from their Googles (What's the difference? Isn't it all just Google?). They might double-click on IE to go to Google but to them, they've just gone to Google. The fact that there are different browsers is confusing. So adding RSS readers into the mix is just asking for trouble.

Then there's the whole debate about where RSS is going. Some of the big names are starting to share less : bit.ly/QcmKIT which is a worrying trend. When I was in a training session recently, teaching the teachers how to use RSS to grab content into Moodle, they loved the idea, and could also see how useful it would be in their daily lives.

So, talking about how useful RSS is, if you don't currently subscribe to James Clay's elearning stuff podcasts, why not? An example episode here starring myself and Dave Sugden: podcast #080

Subscribing and reading RSS feeds

Those of us who use RSS feeds sometimes take it for granted that students or teachers know how to subscribe to feeds and read them. I recently had a request to create a handout on how to do this for the textwall but the instructions will work for any RSS feed so here is the handout.

One 'Web 2.0' site to rule them all

I've been on the search for one ultimate site that will do all that I want it to do, and I still haven't found it. So either someone out there can suggest something for me to try, or I'll have to create it myself!

The site has to be able to:
1. Accept email input of text, photos, videos, audio and other files like PowerPoint etc. (Posterous is good for this, will even convert ppt to iPaper)
2. Provide one or more email addresses that people can post to, regardless of their email address (Vox.com is good for this. Posterous requires you to enter all contributors' email addresses. I suppose this is good for protecting your site, but needs setting up at the start of an academic year)
3. Allow commenting on the post.
4. Be chronological
5. Allow tagging (tags are preferably added as part of the email)
6. Accept RSS feeds and display them in the same part of the window as a post to the blog (so kind of like Twitter. Blogger allows you to add RSS feeds on the side, separate to your blog posts.)
7. Option to be notified by email of contributions to the site.

I probably have a few more requirements but the above are the key ones for now. Can anyone step up to the challenge?

Posterous.com would be my recommendation for education at the minute and although you would have to set up all your learners as contributors to the site by adding their email address (or ask them to do this themselves!), this is one way of protecting the site from 'spam'. Posterous also allows you to set up a password in order to view the site, another advantage from a teaching and learning point of view.

Using email to blog to support learning

I had a fruitful session with a placement manager at Sheffield College yesterday - we discussed what she wanted the learners to be able to do:
1. Easily upload pictures and videos that they had taken with the XDA Flints or their own phones to one place so they could view them in class or in their own time.
2. Comment on each other's pictures and videos
3. Rate them

I was going to use FriendFeed but this only allows you to upload from your own email address, rather than providing you with a generic email address that everyone can use, so we decided to go with Vox.com which has a generous upload limit.

I discovered another great thing about Vox - you can generate additional email addresses to send stuff to. With each email address that you generate, you can add specific tags, so learners could email to one address and have their pictures automatically tagged with certain key words. This will become very useful if you want pictures to be searchable by assignment for instance.

Of course learners can also go online and add additional tags to the photos and videos, as well as the comments.

One thing we haven't yet worked out is the best way to socially share PowerPoint. Slideshare took its time and I wonder if anyone can point me to another good PowerPoint sharing site?

The downside to Vox is that I couldn't update it through an RSS feed. Only certain other blogs are supported.

I guess the one ultimate site that we want to use hasn't yet been invented!

mippin.com - internet aggregator for mobiles

I've had a pda phone for about 2 years now. Used to have the MDA and now have the HTC Touch.

So far on my pda phone, I've installed Newsbreak, a rss reader so I can keep up with the likes of Andy Black and Dave Sugden on the go. I paid a little bit of money for this.
Just come across mippin.com, which seems like a nice free 'aggregator' for the mobile phone, bringing together news sites and blogs in one site. Kind of like igoogle for your phone. It seems to work better than Newsbreak because it shows me the full blog, whereas Newsbreak shows me the headlines and a short version of the blog. To read more, it then launches Internet Explorer and takes me to the site. Mippin will let me keep my preferred sites as favourites and formats them nicely for the pda screen. Seems like a nice function to me.

And it has a mipplet that adds my Twitter stream so it appears on my mippin page! Nice...