August 05, 2005
Easy-to-use Course RSS Feeds?
It had to happen - there is a saying I've seen floating around the blogosphere that if you want to know what will be in the next version of Internet Explorer, look to the popular features of Firefox. So the Microsoft announcement that RSS will feature heavily in IE7 (posted on the IE blog) came as no surprise.
It has to be said that this wasn't totally unexpected either! -
"We’re still actively exploring what is the right name to use for RSS feeds [Microsoft are proposing web feeds], so if you have any ideas or opinions, please post to comments."
Err, how about RSS feeds?
RSS is likely to feature heavily in the next Microsoft operating system desktop too, as you'll know if you've seen the Channel 9 feature on RSS in Longhorn, or if you're a reader of the Longhorn Team RSS Blog.
So what? So if it's going to get easier and easier to consume RSS feeds without having to launch an RSS reader, or log in to an RSS aggregation website, perhaps we should be actively looking at ways of using RSS to deliver certain sorts of information to our students.
The question is - what does it make sense to deliver? In the short term, I'd suggest timely information and alerts, much the same sort of information that would be appropriate for an OU SMS text alert service, for example.
Although I never got round to implementing the course-SMS service (I would have if I'd had access to database driven websites at the time...), I did prototype a course WAP service (T396 Experimental WAP Service), and many of the pages used there map trivially onto corresponding SMS alerts.
The Technology Short Course programme courses did have a Course News RSS feed button on each course homepage at one point, I think, but it's not there any more (or perhaps it was never there, and I just Greasemonkeyed it onto my course pages?).
The Course News feeds do definitely exist though (e.g. here are a couple of feeds for the July, 2005, presentation of T183 and T184) as they are actually used to deliver news to the Course home page.
In a brief email exchange with John Martin about the utility of Course News feeds in courses where there was very little news, the point was raised that if the news is infrequent enough there is no motivation for students to log in to the Course Pages regularly to check for it. However, my feeling was that if students regularly looked at other RSS feeds, then subsrcibing to the Course News feed would make sense.
For students who don't regularly use a news reader, there are currently a couple of other options, such as an alerting Konfabulator widget, or even a Firefox Live Bookmark (see below - though it would be up to the student to check this regulalry. Still a burden, and something to remember to do, but at leats there is no logging in to anywhere required.
There are non-RSS ways of getting the news to the students too, such as SMS text alerts, or even email messages (both of which could be established as user prefernces for a course news service).
Of course, as RSS viewers get embedded in more and more desktops, and become more seemlessly integrated into the practice of everyday computer use, the overhead in terms of getting student to use new software clients, or find new ways of working, is reduced.
As a way of delivering content and alerts, and with the expectation of increasing operating system support, it would be foolish not to start looking seriously at what RSS can do for the ways we interact with the student body.
And it would probably be worth looking at as a way of supporting internal comms, too....;-)
Posted by ajh59 at August 5, 2005 10:17 AM