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Sipping the Firehose: The RSS Post!

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The Web is huge, and everything is all over the place. You want to collect just the stuff you want, and put it in one place. What you want is “RSS.” “Really Simple Syndication” is both old and new: old, because it’s been around for 15 years or more; new, because every day somebody discovers RSS for the first time and wonders where it has been all her life.

RSS?

If you want the hard-core nitty-gritty on “RSS,” you can do a Web search and read up. If you want the easy-peasey brass-tacks version, it’s this: RSS allows you to “feed” select content from the Web to the place(s) that you want it. This can include:

  • receiving email/SMS notification that a select blog has new content;
  • collecting posts from several different blogs into a single feed reader;
  • saving customized Web searches;
  • lots of more complex possibilities.

Here, I just scratch the surface to help you generate ideas, whether for your own professional development or for use in the courses you teach.

To start off, you have to learn to find the RSS icon on any given web site. It looks like this:

RSS icon

Right-click (Mac: Command-click) on that icon at the blog or news site of your choice, and the “RSS feed” link is now saved to your clipboard. Now what do you do with it? Read on.

One-Off RSS Email/SMS Notification

Maybe you only want notifications from blog. For example, I want to be notified every time a Seminarium blog post goes live, so that I can read it and notify my Twitter followers and Facebook friends. Or, if I am a student, perhaps my course includes a group blog, and I want to be notified every time one of my classmates publishes a blog post. In this case, I only need to collect a single feed. The simplest choice here would be to choose one of any number of web-based RSS-to-email/SMS services.

Email or SMS notifications not your thing? If you want to get fancy, then you can use “If This Then That” (IFTTT) to create other “triggers” that suit you better. When that new Seminarium blog post goes live, IFTTT can trigger a Facebook status update on my wall; or a new Google Calendar item reminding me to respond with a comment; or alert WeMo to notify me surreptitiously by switching on my porch light; or…

Combining RSS Feeds with Yahoo Pipes

It’s been five years since I really used Yahoo Pipes, and I actually had to check to see if it still exists. Yahoo Pipes has never gotten the kind of fanfare it deserves, in part because they’ve never figured out how to tap and persuade a mass market of users. Yahoo Pipes is “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” Their main page includes a link to a terrific tutorial (YouTube).

My own use of Yahoo Pipes has been pretty straightforward. Rather than a single course group blog, I often like for my learners to have to create their own blogging spaces (like at WordPress.com or Blogger.com). Then, I use Yahoo Pipes to collect all of their blogs’ RSS feeds into a single feed. Think of it like a funnel, with several streams pouring in and only one stream pouring out.

Here is a very simple pipe: I am simply collecting everything published at ProfHacker and at Hybrid Pedagogy. The output is a single RSS feed, combining all the input RSS feeds into one. If I chose, I could build the Pipe with a filter: say, only collecting blog posts that include the word “pedagogy,” or “assessment.”

As you can see, I can simply view the output there at Yahoo Pipes, or I can collect the output in several ways (see the top of the feed window, including “more options”): I can set up email/SMS notification, or collect the single resulting RSS feed to use elsewhere, or direct the output to a feed reader like NewsGator or NetVibes.

Feed Readers

Feed Readers could be a post in themselves. Taking NetVibes as an example: NetVibes allows me two large “dashboards,” a Public dashboard and a Private dashboard. My own Public Dashboard currently includes feeds from Seminarium, my personal blog, and my Twitter feed, as well as always-running Web searches for the terms “Old Testament,” “Hebrew Bible,” and “Biblical Hebrew.” My Private dashboard (which you can’t see, because private) is where I collect feeds from my favorite blogs and news sites.

AAAH! It’s Too Much!

Yes, it is; and there is much more you can learn (for example, capturing only the Comments feed for a blog, instead of the main content).

So figure out exactly one (1) thing that would make your life slightly easier, and try it. For example, here at Seminariumblog.org, right-click (Mac: Command-click) on the RSS icon up there next to the Search bar and the social-media icons. Choose an email/SMS notification service, and start receiving email or text-message notices when a new blog post goes live.

How do you use RSS, whether for professional development or in the classroom? What Web content would you like to collect, but don’t know how (yet)?

Photo credit: “Faces get pepper spray [Image 5 of 5]” taken by Gunnery Sgt. Scott Dunn, made available by DVIDSHUB using a CC-BY-2.0 license.

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Brooke Lester, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in Hebrew Bible and Director for Emerging Pedagogies, at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (Evanston IL). He received his degree in Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

We are pleased that Brooke has agreed to serve as Seminarium’s curator, because – in his own words – I am an instructor who has “discovered” the scholarship of teaching and learning, and who talks about it with something of the fanaticism of the convert.

Brooke writes: There is a famous curse about being doomed to live “in exciting times,” and it’s not always fun to be living through the greatest upheaval in literacy since Gutenberg (or possibly since the dawn of writing), but, well…here we are!

My favorite thing about “digital learning” is that the stakes are in fact as high as we think they are: the digitization of language makes us talk together about how we really think learning happens, and then it makes us reconsider almost everything we think we know about that.

More insight into Brooke’s pedagogical “reconsiderings” can be found on his personal blog: http://www.anumma.com.