EDUCAUSE | RSS

7 Things You Should Know About Ning

gdobbin — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:54:04 -0500

Ning is an online service that allows users to create their own social networks and join and participate in other networks. No technical skill is required to set up a social network, and there are no limits to the number of networks a user can join. Users of Ning social networks have access to functionality similar to that of more well-known social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. Various features allow users to read news or learn about related events, join groups, read and comment on blog entries, view photos and videos, and other activities as set up by the network creator. RSS feeds let users subscribe to updates from specific parts of the social network.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

In addition to the "7 Things You Should Know About…" briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more, please visit the ELI Resources page.

Sophisticated and Productive Tools for Higher Ed: Web 2.0

drupal — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 08:56:19 -0600

Higher education can benefit from the web 2.0 revolution, from simple tools that allow groups to communicate to combining databases that produce an entirely new product. Social networking, wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, videoblogs, and extensive use of multimedia are changing the way we process and use information.

Engineering a Public Affairs Project

drupal — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:38:59 -0600

This session will describe a collaboration between two very different academic disciplines at Princeton University, the University Channel and CoBlitz, to deliver recordings of public events in academia to millions. The partners describe how a group of public policy schools teamed up with an engineering consortium to create this unique multimedia project.

Community Development

StuartYeates — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:25:51 -0500

At OSS Watch we've been focusing on community development recently, that is getting people up to speed on how to build a community around a project (usually a software project, standardisation effort or similar).

We've started a Community Development mailing list, the discussions have mainly focused, so far, on RSS and on the use of Google Analytics in education.

I've also written an extensive piece on how to improve a page on Wikipedia.

Blogamp U for Enterprise Podcasting

cafemuse — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 18:01:33 -0500

Starting this month, we are offering schools a chance to deliver audio to the masses and to the classes. Every school will be able to store all MP3's on their own server while delivery of on-demand and podcasting is delivered by Blogamp U. For regular podcasts, up to 10 courses, we will be making our system available at no charge for the first semester. For more information, please contact us.

The Ultimate RSS Toolbox - 120+ RSS Resources

ckeller — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:45:51 -0500

The author strives to provide a comprehensive list of all the RSS readers, tools, browser plugins, tips, hacks and directories available on the web.

ELI Brief Focuses on RSS and Its Teaching Potential

ecoghlan — Sat, 12 May 2007 14:56:46 -0500

Would you like to know what RSS is—or simply find a way to explain it well to others? Read 7 Things You Should Know About RSS from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). This brief provides a jargon-free overview of RSS as well as tips on how to use it for teaching and learning. It is part of the 7 Things You Should Know About... briefing series from ELI.

Still haven't converted over to RSS... watch this!

jeffvand — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:33:35 -0500

I ran across this great video this morning (on a blog in my RSS reader) for those of you who aren't using RSS yet... now's the time. Get on board!

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.
A while ago I also blogged about why RSS is going to change the academic community. That might be of some interest to some of you too. Cheers!

(Original Post: http://www.edutechie.com/2007/04/still-havent-converted-over-to-rss-watch-this/)

You'll be happy to know there is a RSS feed for Educause Connect Blogs too!

7 Things You Should Know About RSS

drupal — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 09:45:48 -0500

RSS is a protocol that lets users subscribe to online content using a "reader" or "aggregator." Internet users tend to settle on preferred information sources. RSS allows users to create a list of those sources in an application that automatically retrieves updates, saving users considerable time and effort.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single practice or technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use "7 Things You Should Know About..." briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Using RSS to Make Library Resources an Obvious Choice for Students in Blackboard

drupal — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:50:54 -0500

A cooperative project among three Illinois institutions to incorporate standard tools to enhance library resources and services within a course management system will be demonstrated. Using RSS feeds within Blackboard, the libraries provide content targeted for individual courses as well as research tutorials and general library information for students and faculty.

Social Computing: Lifestyle Becomes a Workstyle

drupal — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:43:09 -0600

Presentation at the Fifth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 6-8, 2006, in Carefree, Arizona. This talk focuses on understanding the culture and design criteria of social software and how they both reflect and impact institutions and organizations.

New JISC website

StuartYeates — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 03:49:12 -0500

The JISC have refreshed their website, introducing RSS goodness and greatly increasing the ability to find information about programmes, projects and services, such as OSS Watch. Their RSS feed of funding opportunities is likely to be especially well subscribed.

Unfortunately the RSS is write only, and the new JISC website appears to make no use of the many quality feeds that their services produce.

Penn State Live Offers Mobile News Service

drupal — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 11:51:04 -0500

Pennsylvania State university will launch a text-messaging wireless service called PSUTXT today as an expansion of Penn State Live, a news service with 360,000 subscribers. The university plans to use the service to send text messages of news alerts to mobile devices.Registered users can sign up for short message service (SMS) text messages on campus emergencies, sports, and concert information. Topics will expand as users indicate an interest in other types of information. PSUTXT targets Penn State students, faculty, and staff, although anyone may subscribe.

Features of photo sharing services

StuartYeates — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 05:00:45 -0500

I've got approaching thousand images on the flickr photo sharing website and have been considering whether I should continue my annual subscription or move to another service. This has led me to consider what features I really want or need enough to pay for, and from there to consider what features of flickr I current use:

I upload photos regularly (at least weekly)
I use flickr as my primary backup for images: if my computer harddisk dies, all the photos I care about are safe on flickr
I spend considerable time tagging my photos, both with tags which apply to entirely batches / sets and with tags which apply to individual photos
I use URLs of flickr photos (usually my own) in email or blogging
I license all of my uploaded photos under the Creative Commons (with a rare exception or two)
I participate minimally in several flickr-based communities, with a mind to building my photographic skills and experience.
I divide my photos religiously into sets, to make it easy to locate (and tag) photos, particularly travel photos
I use my flickr RSS feed in several places (and in several different RSS formats)
I publish almost all of my photos publicly. The only reason some of them are private is because once I see them on the larger screen they're dreadful shots, or because some people don't like their photos being public (two I encounter regularly) and I do my best to accommodate them.
Rarely I upload non-photographic images to flickr, but not enough to worry about recent issues

It is a little hard to know which features I might use without actually using a system that offered the features and seeing how they worked, but the features foremost in my mind currently are:

Namespaced importing of EXIF tags as flickr tags
Native support for geotagging
Easier export of tags, especially via RSS/XML
Native support for dublin core tagging (Creator, Title, Subject (using tags), ...)
The ability to write add flickr tags and descriptions into the image metadata, so when it gets downloaded the metadata associated with it is not lost.
The ability for users to deprecate the quality of images: to say that this is a lousy image, but I'm uploading because it's the best I've got of the subject.
Support for describing that an image is derived (cropped, balanced, etc.) from another
Support for directly linking images as being of the same subject (even if one of the images is by another user)
Support for timed release of images: upload ten images and have one "appear" in the photostream every hour for ten hours
Support for grouping contacts, I have 800 contacts, and finding for example, contacts I work with, just isn't practical at the moment.

Looking at these the first thing I notice is that, with the exception of the last two, are entirely about metadata. Maybe this is because I'm an RDF geek.

Some of the features I'd like, but are much lower on my list of priorities are:

The ability to customise the background and layout of the photo pages.
Rule-based sets, since the camera make and model are in the EXIF data in every image and flickr is already reading this data, it would be great to be able to sort them into sets based on this kind of thing
Arbitrary boolean searching on tags and text
A broader range of image licences, including the GPL and national CC variants

Of course, any site that did offer me all of these features, would probably have to offer me an easy way to migrate my existing images (and their metadata).

Looking at the cameras used by flickr users, which are led by the entry-level digital SLR cameras, I'm guessing that most of flickr users are fairly serious about their photography, but I've got no real feel for what their priorities are. I suspect that those from a visual media / photography background see the customisation of background and layout as significantly more important than I do. There's a list of features, on which many users have voted,

One feature set that is entirely absent from my list is privacy. Maybe because I don't upload pictures of children or naked people, I feel little or no interest in this. The only reason I hide the photos that I do hide is because it's requires two fewer clicks than deleting them.

So, what image sharing sites do you use, and what are your important features?

RDF and walled gardens

StuartYeates — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 03:16:47 -0500

It seems to me a natural consequence of the increasing bridging of traditional data sources into RDF is that the number of "walled gardens" of RDF is increasing. Walled gardens are areas from which there is no escape, and while they certainly have their uses (in particular controlling who can access what), they erode the overall usefulness of the system as a whole, by meaning that you literally can't get to there from here.

Examples of RDF walled gardens include the FOAF generated by such systems as tribe.net and livejournal. While it is useful that these sites are exposing data in a machine readable web 2.0 format such as RDF/FOAF, the inability to link to people, resources and interests outside the walled garden represent a significant barrier to interoperability. I am the same person in my blog RSS feed, my flickr photo feed, my del.icio.us feed , my tribe FOAF and my hand-edited FOAF, but only the last can I link to the others, despite the fact that they are all in the same format.

How do you overcome a garden walls and fragmented RDF? Well ideally you create a semantic map from each of the gardens into a more widely used frame of reference, but creating and maintaining such mappings is a huge burden in terms of time and energy, particularly for those of us who have data in a dozens (or even hundreds) of walled gardens.

A lighter-weight approach might be to create a service which allows users to associate URIs for "landmark" real-world entities across different walled gardens. Such a service would not map all entities, only relatively small numbers that a user actually cares about, which actually turn out to be important starting seed points for mapping ontologies (an altogether larger and more complex task, but one which might usefully be aided by the presence of existing seeds).

Landmarks for me might be myself (obviously), key people I work with, communities I am involved with and passtimes that interest me.

Such a service would not have to make a big priority of security, because the walled gardens, by their nature, are secure. Simple user authentication might be required to avoid rampant spamming, but would have to be very lightweight, to avoid the service becoming a kind of walled garden itself, with the unauthenticated being able to look in, but not plant seeds of their own. Lightweight authentication would also solve the uniqueness problem (my idea of the key URIs for "open source" my differ from yours), by labelling associations by user.

Make site current without overloading the webmaster

joeclark — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:40:37 -0600

I've recently encountered a couple of cool tools that can help make your site more interactive and current, on a budget, without driving your webmaster insane.

Want to share a reading list with your audience, such as guides for classroom instruction, podcasting, etc.? LibraryThing is yet another social computing tool that lets you catalog books (ones you own or ones you want) online, organize them with tags, and share your reactions with others. It's incredibly easy to add books -- I had been using Amazon's wish list function to keep track of books on my wish list, and LibraryThing imports these! They also have a "bookmarklet" that lets you add any book you find on Amazon to your library list with one click.

Even cooler, they have a "widget" that you can put on any web site featuring random or selected books -- see an example on my RTFM! blog (scroll down, on the right). You could create an organizational account and include "highlighted" among the tags, and then feature that list somewhere on your website. As staff add useful books to the LibraryThing account, you can easily tweak the tags to rotate them into and out of the display.

Relatedly, I found a freeware service -- the RSS Box Viewer -- that lets you easily put an RSS feed on any page. I'm using it on my work homepage to display recent entries in my Educause blog (is this getting recursive enough yet?).

Both of these nicely complement the del.icio.us tagroll -- a great way to share discoveries in online spaces, e.g. journal articles on instructional tech -- as well as tag clouds, which provide an alternative cognitive map of information or interests for site visitors (see examples of both at jsclark.net).

One of the best things about all of these things is that once you set the feeds up, they update automatically. Call 'em textcasts. :-)

Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?

drupal — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 10:51:33 -0600

Web 1.0 has demonstrated immense powers for connecting learners, teachers, and materials. How much more broadly will this connective matrix grow under the impact of the openness, ease of entry, and social nature of Web 2.0?

Remodeling CourseWorks: Web Services Explained

drupal — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:49:14 -0600

This presentation highlights a new family of emerging technologies - including Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and tagging - for which educational applications are just now being explored. We discuss the publication and syndication of audio, photos, and individual contributions directly into a "hot-rodded" CourseWorks site. The techniques described in this presentation can be used to rejuvenate many aging legacy systems.

RSS: The Next Killer App For Education

drupal — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:04:19 -0600

Like many technology specialists, I've been looking for the next "killer app" for quite some time. I would define a killer application as a program that provides the capability for an average person to use technology to solve every day problems and enrich their lives. E-mail was the first killer app and its usefulness to anyone who wishes to adopt it as an alternative communication tool has been demonstrated clearly by its embrace across the entire spectrum of computer users. Now, a new technology, RSS, Rich Site Summary—sometimes known as Really Simple Syndication, takes the communication paradigm of one-to-one messaging one step further and provides the ability to efficiently communicate information to not just family and friends, but anyone on the internet who may be interested, whether you know them or not.

Breathing New Life into Legacy Media Servers

drupal — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 10:44:10 -0600

This session will focus on the transformation of legacy media deployment servers such as Windows Media and Real Networks servers into content repositories capable of being indexed and syndicated. Coverage includes the need for rich media, rich media encoding techniques and deployment strategies, RSS syndication, and media reusability.

Where Learners Go

drupal — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 11:37:13 -0600

The author discusses how to strengthen the library role in online learning.

CASE web meeting on Blogs, RSS, Podcasts and Wikis

mikeguentzel — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 11:31:53 -0600

Like me, some of you might have participated in a great "webinar" put on by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) this past Thursday.

Public Relations representatives from a number of different colleges and universities viewed the presentation of a WebEx session. Even though I knew much of the subject area (Blogs, RSS, Podcasts and Wikis), I found it extremely useful to see how other higher ed entities are using these new technologies.

We had several of our PR reps from McCombs in attendance and we had an interesting discussion after the seminar. We had a few people wanting to jump in with both feet and we had others who wanted to wait and see. We're already doing some limited blogging and limited RSS. I think we could probably use wikis internally, I'm not sure we would use them for the general public; I guess I would have to see some more ideas.

Podcasting has been somewhat controversial here. While some faculty are comfortable with the idea of recording their lectures to be disseminated via a podcast, there are many others who don't like the idea. "If you podcast, students won't come to class," they argue. Others don't want to give the clearance to use their material because it's copyrighted. It will take some time, but I think podcasting will come around.

You can find more information about the webinar from The Future of PR website.

A conversation with Brian Lamb

mpasiewicz — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 15:27:00 -0500

In this 20 minute interview, we'll hear from Brian Lamb, Project Coordinator at the University of British Columbia as he shares thoughts on blogs, podcasts, wikis, aggRSSive, and the potential for Creative Commons in academia. Brian's weblog is available at Abject Learning.

Higher Ed RSS feeds

mikeguentzel — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 21:03:43 -0500

I'm finding a few feeds that look like they're updated regularly.

The Chronicle of Higher Education (from their RSS Help page):

Syndication for Higher Ed

New York Times education feed

Washington Post education feed

Weblogs in Higher Education Blog

More as I find them. When I get enough, I'll put together an OPML file.

Podcasts at Notre Dame

cclark2 — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 16:13:40 -0500

I am an Assistant Director at the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning at Notre Dame. I help faculty integrate technology into their courses. Our Learning Technology Lab assists faculty in developing web sites, WebCT courses, Flash movies, and more

I also teach a course in the Computer Applications Program, called "Applied Multimedia Technology." I just released the third podcast for the course, and this one is not too bad. You can subscribe to "CAPP 30523" at iTunes or you can visit the course blog.

The students who work at the Learning Technology Lab are about to release their first podcast as well. I have been working with an art professor who is having his students create audio tours of the on-campus Snite Museum of Art. He is interested in the idea of publishing the tours as podcasts.

The University's PR department has also said they are interested in the idea of podcasting, but nothing has happened so far.

-- Chris Clark, chris.clark@nd.edu

RSS, SFX and Metalib

mpasiewicz — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 14:26:00 -0500

The Shifted Librarian has a new post about David Walker's interesting RSS Creator application that uses SFX and Metalib to create RSS feeds for journals. Pretty interesting.

What makes this work? Open standards and open APIs. Good stuff!

Multimedia Search Sorts Messy Web

drupal — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 11:24:42 -0500

Finding video and audio on the net is getting easier as more companies look to automated ways of delivering specific content to people's computers.

Integrating Library Reserves and Course Management Systems: Aleph, RSS, and Sakai

drupal — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 12:10:19 -0600

The University of Michigan Library provides course reserves information to the Sakai-driven campus course management system through RSS. We will discuss the system's framework, describe technical challenges, and suggest collaborative strategies for implementing a similar service. Usage statistics, user responses, and strategies for overcoming technical challenges will also be discussed.

Learning Objects, Wikis, and Blogs - Oh My

drupal — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 12:10:15 -0600

The advent of instructional standards (SCORM) and XML-based learning management systems have created a virtual buffet of reasons to take the plunge into online teaching. Be smart about designing online courses: create course components that use learning objects, reflective journaling through blogs, and peer-review processes through wikis.

The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web

drupal — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 15:48:05 -0600

This paper describes the growing uptake of RSS within science publishing as seen from Nature Publishing Group's (NPG) perspective.

Connecting Learning Objects with RSS, Trackback, and Weblogs

drupal — Tue, 07 Sep 2004 17:28:55 -0500

This presentation is from a 2003 NMC conference.

Plate Full?: Try IT with MERLOT

drupal — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 12:32:00 -0600

MERLOT provides a growing set of resources and services that help reduce staff and faculty workload while creating sustainable, user-centered, self-supported teaching with technology. This session will demonstrate MERLOT's RSS, federated search, search and browse, peer review, and personal collections that provide usable and free services to leverage cooperative participation in innovations.