Monthly Archives: July 2004

What is RSS?

RSS is defined by some as Rich Site Summary, others as RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary, while a few call it Really Simple Syndication. Whatever it may be called, RSS is a means of delivering content directly from the author to its recipient automatically, instantaneously and without viruses, spam and other electronic nuisance.

What makes RSS special is the way it is being used and delivered. Usually, a RSS is created by the content or news publisher (usually seen by many as content expert) and then delivered to people who have subscribed to the feed using a RSS “feed reader” application called an aggregator. When the aggregator is initialized, it would crawl out to the different content providers and download summarized information automatically. A subscriber can subscribe to multiple feeds and read these summarized news on one screen. If the subscriber is interested in any particular news, he/she can then click on the headline of an item and access the full article from the originating website

Beyond the Technology

RSS is useful as it keep users up-to-date with new content on websites and weblogs (blogs). It has the potential to replace email updates or even HTML newsletters.

With RSS, a subscriber is given the controls to subscribe to the contents he or she wants to view, thus eliminating possibility of unwanted emails and spam. RSS, being a read-only XML language, is not a possible means of transporting viruses and worms. Subscribing to a RSS feed is anonymous; no one can send you a message outside the channel you are subscribing to and if you are unhappy with the contents which you subscribed to, you can remove the link on your own. Another useful feature of RSS is it allows users to communicate without the exchanging of personal email addresses.

RSS usually comes pre-categorized. You can read your news and updates in an organized manner. This is unlike receiving an email, when you will first have to set filters and rules.

RSS also allows users to syndicate or republish others’ contents and provide the latest news to his own readers without composing it himself. There are no legal implications and copyright violations because the actual full content is residing on the originating site.

RSS and Learning

RSS has been used by instructors in many ways. Some ways you can use RSS include:
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  • Subscribing to current feeds on a certain subject you are interested in
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  • Republishing syndicated contents on your own module website or blogs

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  • Notifying readers about new contents, news & resources (both internal and external) made available for your modules.

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  • Having learners create their own web logs and then subscribing to the feeds of all these web logs to check on their new contents. This encourages learners to self-reflect on what they have learnt.

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  • Subscribing to feeds from learning object repositories to see the newest objects added to a topic of your interest (see Merlot below).

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  • A social networking tool which sends you information about others who have joined your network of research etc.

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  • Problem solving – you can subscribe to a feed that describes the topics related to your needs and get updates whenever someone writes on that topic. This is similar to discussion thread forums.

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  • Collaborative workspaces that aggregate different pieces of information to different individuals working on the same project.

Summary

RSSes and Weblogs allow the objective aggregation of contents in a world where spams and viruses are consistently annoying our users. The ability for RSS to gather accurate and selective information quickly makes it a useful educational tool. It is probably one of the few ways used to keep up to speed in a world wide web of information which changes daily. RSS enables users to effectively and efficiently gather and share knowledge across borders and boundaries.

RSS Tutorial
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Interesting Educational Sites using RSS to inform users
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RSS Aggregators
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I am the proud winner of the CIT-sponsored NUS Students' Choice Award for best module website, 2003/4.

Strength in numbers: I maintain six sites for the module in question, PH1101EGEM1004 "Reason and Persuasion".

There is a main site, a site for online readings, and four associated weblogs.

In this article, by way of telling you what I did right (near as I can figure), I'm mostly going to tell you about 'blogs', as they are called.

Most departments - like mine - have large introductory modules offered semester after semester. On average, large modules benefit most from web resources (because student-teacher contact suffers with size, and because the utility of a site is partly a function of the sheer number of users.) These large modules also tend to be the very cases in which a heavy investment early on could, from the instructor's point of view, potentially pay for itself in terms of labor saved over the long haul of many semesters. One way to arrange this payoff, then, would be for departments to try to find a way to make the following offer, in effect, if not absolutely officially: work extra hard for a semester, building something online and fine that will last; then live easily and well for several semesters on the fruits of your initial labor.

On to the blogs - which are a lot easier to set up than lavish, custom websites and extensive online resources, believe me.

What is a blog?

A blog is, minimally, a browser-accessed page containing 'posts' - that is, serially accumulated bits of usually brief content, titled helpfully, ordered and displayed chronologically, archived sensibly, 'permalinked' for easy access. An extra that is probably a bare necessity for most teaching purposes is a comments box. Each post becomes its own mini-discussion forum, in effect. Add a discrete sidebar with links to syllabi, resources, a reading list and other module basics and you have, if you want to do it that way, a complete module homepage.

But the best way to understand what blogs are - they really are not hard to understand - is not to read a verbal description. Visit one and see it for yourself. You might start with my main module blog. Then perhaps take a look at an academic group-blog - I myself am a proud member of one of the larger, better-known ones, Crooked Timber (see below for URL's for sites referenced in this article). 15 academics from various fields, from colleges and universities all over the world, offering up informal / academic / journalistic / intellectual / personal commentary on a wide range of topics to 7,000 to 9,000 daily visitors, many of them academics. (A bigger audience than my scholarly work ever receives.)

Blogging is a bit of a Next Big Thing in academia, at least in the US. It is moving into the academic mainstream (although the informal, often personal character of the medium leads to confusion and doubt about whether 'publications' in this form will ever merit inclusion on a CV, for example.)

But let us turn to classroom uses.

For my module there is a main blog on which I am the sole author of posts, apart from comments left by students and tutors. There are three subsidiary 'tutorblogs', each populated by two or three tutors, making their own posts for their particular students. Every tutor makes a post a week, on average. When I am at my most dutiful I make semi-daily posts of various sorts, mostly quite short. Sometimes tutors link to my posts, and vice versa. So they are loosely integrated. Taken together, the four blogs constitute a central clearinghouse for new, relatively dynamic module content, as well as serving as a locus of student discussion and, frankly, functioning as rudder for a very big boat. With one lecturer and up to nine tutors and 500+ students there is considerable difficulty steering. (I don't happen to have a module with a particularly rigid spine of definite content to be covered week by week: more one of those sprawling 'big ideas' modules.)

Having everyone posting allows tutors to keep an eye on what I am saying and thinking outside of lecture, which helps them lead discussions; it allows me to keep an eye on the tutors, and on what tutors' students are posting. And students can see what is going on in other discussion sections. And so forth. All this is achieved in friendly, low-pressure, slow-but-steady-wins-the-race fashion (at least that is the hope.)

The blogs are where my students turn for discussion questions and topics, announcements, clarifications to points made in lecture, things that couldn't fit into lecture, things I thought of five minutes after lecture and slapped my forehead, items of interest, stray tidbits, fun thoughts, exam hints, paper-writing advice, interesting links. The chronological post format makes it relatively easy for students to drop by every day or two, find anything and everything that may be new, and participate in often quite lively discussions. (The tech-savvy can be alerted to any updates by RSS-feed.)

As a module requirement, each student is required to contribute at least three comments to blog posts in the course of the semester. Each comment auto-generates its own URL, so it's easy for students to direct tutors to comments for marking purposes.

I should add that I think blogging is just as suitable for small modules, although in that case the function is a bit different. This past year I set up a blog for an honours module with only a dozen students. The blog served as a relatively intimate seminar space. This year I'm planning to do it again - better - with students given post-authorship privileges, above and beyond comment privileges. Posts will be seminar presentations, in effect.

Of course all this can be achieved with old, familiar IVLE discussion forums (or mass email, if it comes to that.) But the permalinked post + comment + archive blog format has substantial advantages. As attested by the booming popularity of blogs on the internet generally, the blog interface has been found by many users to be a nice case of pleasing form following valued function. When user experience is good, it's good to bring it into the classroom. But visit a few blogs and decide for yourself.

Blogging is also technologically simple, if only because it's simple to get someone else to do the work if you need or want help. There are a number of free blogging services available on the web. Ease of sign-up and use is comparable to that of an internet hotmail account. If you can send email, you can sign-up, set-up and use a decent-looking blog, with comments enabled, in about half an hour. Like email, you needn't have any idea what is going on under the lid, code and protocol-wise and so forth. There are also premium services. And some universities and colleges in the US provide blogging services to faculty, for teaching purposes, through their versions of IVLE. Possibly CIT will consider such an expansion of service as a supplement to existing discussion forum offerings.

Last but not least, blogging is just plain simple. You don't need a grand plan, or even a plan (although it wouldn't hurt.) You just compose quick bits and pieces to suit the moment - even just the mood. You mend and patch and add to and refine the unfolding matter of your module in odd moments. Whatever semi-order emerges incidentally from this steady, occasional activity will probably do; and any more concerted effort, over and above, will only make it better still. Again, the comparison with email is apt. Blogging does not add significantly to your preparation time, in my experience, because mentally it overlaps so significantly with regular email (and lecture-prep, and discussion-prep, and one-on-one meetings, and other 'sunk-costs' of basic teaching.)

Blogging your module, while teaching it, is more a matter of getting in the habit of recording and conveniently storing all the little, modestly useful stuff you produce in any case - things that might otherwise be forgotten and disappear without a trace, or at least not reach an audience of students who can make some use of it. And the habit of recording these little bits instills an incidental discipline of crafting each little bit just a little bit as it goes by. Which never hurts and often helps.

Take a look and see what you think.

Links:
My main site:
http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/phihjc/PH1101EGEM1004/index.html

My main blog (with links to tutor blogs):
http://examinedlife.typepad.com/ph1101egem1004/

Crooked Timber:
http://www.crookedtimber.org/

Crooked Timber, the academic group-blog of which I am a member, has a vast sidebar containing links to academic blogs, i.e. blogs maintained by faculty at colleges or universities, broken down by discipline.

The Volokh Conspiracy [another well-known academic blog, with a focus on American legal issues]:
http://volokh.com/

A Chronicle of Higher Education article on academic blogs [it's a year old, hence out of date, but a place to start]:
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39a01401.htm

In the last year, dozens of articles have appeared on academic blogging, and hundreds of articles about blogging in general. Google is probably your next stop.