Really Simple Syndication:
Newspaper analogy: Associated Press is a syndicated news service. Articles published by AP appear in newspapers all over the country. RSS-delivered information is syndicated electronically in a similar manner: content posted to one website can be imported by RSS-enabled sites all over the Web, just the way that an AP story would appear in many newspapers.

"Radio RSS": broadcasting and receiving
To use another analogy, RSS is used to deliver information over the web in the form of articles, posts, or headlines/titles via a feed or "channel." The concept behind this is similar to radio broadcasting. This channel is a relationship between one website and an infinite number of others. We can think of the site originating the content as a "broadcaster," and the infinite number of other sites as "receivers."

History/ background

The earliest incarnation of RSS was invented by Dan Libby in 1999 for use in a personalized portal that Netscape developed for users. This page displayed dynamic, self-updating content. The rise of the popularity of blogging and news feeds necessitated the ability to aggregate or collect content on one page in order to keep up with the various sources users might normally visit. We'll learn more about aggregators and portals shortly.

So far we've suggested that RSS works in a way that is analogous to a technological device you are all familiar with: a radio. One website is the "broadcaster," and an infinite number of others can be the "receivers." The information travels from broadcaster to receiver via an RSS feed or channel.
Types of broadcasters: blogs or news sites. Information is published or posted to news sites or blogs, and is flagged with some special xml code. This enables other Web sites we've been calling "receivers" such as portals, aggregators or your WebCT course, to automatically discover and post the information that has arrived via the RSS feed or channel.

Blogs/ online diaries:
If you buy our radio analogy, blogs are a type of "broadcaster." Though not always, they are typically RSS enabled. They normally consist of relatively small articles called posts, which are often displayed in reverse chronological order on a long, scrolling page. Posts are often riddled with links to other blogs or sites. The short articles that constitute a blog, or links to them, can be detected and collected by aggregators or other "receivers." Many blogs allow users to comment on posts.

News feeds:
News articles can be broadcast via RSS feeds to receivers such as aggregators or portals similar to the way that blog posts are delivered.

Aggregators and portals: "My MSN.com" and other commercial personalized pages are customized with dynamic content that is updated automatically via RSS feeds. On a regular basis, aggregators can search for sites offering syndicated content. Aggregators recognize and import content that has been flagged with xml code (RSS) so that the user can simply access information from all their favorite blogs or news sources via one common interface.

So, we just introduced the concept of broadcasters and receivers. For the most part, Blogs and news sites are the sites we can think of as broadcasters. Though we won't get too far into wikis today, they are worth mentioning as an innovative and unique use for RSS. Many of you have heard of Wikipedia, which is an example of a wiki, a page that can be edited easily by users using no other software besides the web browser. Combine this concept with an online encyclopedia, and you get Wikipedia: an online encyclopedia with entries any user may edit. Some editors are fanatical about keeping entries on their favorite topics accurate, so they subscribe to an RSS feed that notifies them which articles have been changed recently. This is tremendously important to the success and accuracy of Wikipedia, because it enables experts on certain topics to monitor changes to entries and to eliminate "vandalism" or profanity and to correct factual and grammatical errors. Thus, Wikipedia relies on the principle of strength in numbers, and the hope that authoritative editors will keep less-than-competent or ill-intentioned editors in check. Portals, such as mymsn.com, and aggregators, such as Bloglines, can be thought of as receivers. By the end of this presentation, you'll know how to turn your WebCT classes into receivers, and you'll be able to enhance your students' learning experience by importing dynamic content automatically!

Lib Line:
Lib Line, the HCCS library blog, is used to deliver updates, library news, or research tips to HCC students, faculty/staff, and community. Posts appear in reverse-chronological order on the page. Users could receive the latest posts in three ways: they could visit the page, they could use an aggregator to import the posts, or they could sign up to have the posts delivered via email.

My MSN:
The mymsn.com portal page can be thought of as a "receiver." The user chooses news stories, weather forecasts, and other RSS feeds to be arranged on the portal page. This information refreshes automatically, as portals retrieve and publish the most recent feeds.

Bloglines:
An aggregator is set up by the user to do exactly as its name suggests: to aggregate or accumulate content that is delivered via RSS feeds. Think of it as a table of contents offering links to news articles and blog posts on your favorite topics. This table of contents is constantly refreshing the information, adding posts or articles that are published by RSS-enabled sites.

Bloglines Search Feature:
It is possible to search for only those sites that offer RSS feeds. Bloglines and Google Blog Search are two examples of blog search engines that will find RSS-savvy sites. As with any Web search, it will be up to you, the user, to sort out the reliable from the non-reliable information. However, Bloglines will sort by popularity. This will cause the creme de la creme of the blogosphere to rise to the top. Try searching for the name of your specific discipline (i.e. "business law") or by using a search term that incorporates the name of your discipline (i.e. "business news").

Locating URLs for RSS feeds:
Once you have located a suitable source of RSS feeds, look for a small orange or blue icon labeled either "xml" or "rss" on the page and click on that icon. (If there is no such icon, look for the word "RSS" or "subscribe" elsewhere in the page. That should lead you to the feed URL.) You will see a page of code. The URL of the feed will appear in the internet address field at the top of the browser window. This feed location will enable you to import content into your rss aggregator or into your WebCT classroom.

Okay - so Barret has explained to you what RSS is and common ways it's used. It delivers bits of information across channels much like a radio station does. And, just like radio waves, without a receiver, RSS is pointless. Both radio waves and RSS require receivers to be utilized to their maximum potential. Now, you can of course use a feed reader like Bloglines to receive that content yourself, but requiring your students to do that is another question entirely.

Students, like everyone else, tend to like convenience. If they have to run down to the local coffee shop to read the paper every morning, they may not always get around to it. But, if they could get a daily subscription - for free - then they just might become more regular readers. Today, I'm going to show you how you can approximate a lot of free subscriptions of your choosing for your students, and get fresh, changing content delivered to them on a daily basis with minimal effort. We're going to use a free tool called Feed2JS that will help you grab these feeds and drop them straight into your WebCT classroom. In effect, what we'll be doing is using WebCT as a public feed aggregator for your students. It certainly won't have all the bells and whistles that a personal account at Bloglines will, but it will have the benefit of being in your WebCT classroom.

When we start talking about pulling feeds into a WebCT classroom, we really start to consider some amazing possibilities. Today, though, we're just going to touch on some basics.

We're going to go into a demo classroom, and there, I'll show you:
• How you can use RSS to broadcast messages
• Touch on the idea of even using it to broadcast your own messages
• Look at ways you can organize feeds to create reading themes for your students
• Talk a little bit about how some library database vendors are experimenting with RSS

Go ahead and open up http://webct.homeip.net, and login as guest1/guest1.

In this WebCT shell, RSS feeds are pulled in several ways. The first, and most obvious is right on the welcome page. Earlier, Barret showed you the HCC Libraries blog, LibLine, which we're using as one way to deliver library information to our DE students. As Barret suggested, most blogs have an RSS feed, and LibLine is no different. Faculty can, if they choose, import feeds directly from LibLine and have information from the libraries - things like how to find subscription databases, how to use the catalog, etc - piped straight into their classrooms. So this lower text block on the welcome page shows the most recent posts from LibLine. Whenever a new instructional tidbit is added to the blog, this display in WebCT is updated to reflect that.

Here I've used the HCC Libraries blog as an example. But something to consider is that if you have your own blog (and blogs are free and easy to start), you can use that to broadcast messages across all of your WebCT classrooms. Say, for example, that you teach management courses, and you have 2 different WebCT courses going on. If something in the news catches your eye, you can post to your blog about that event, and, via the magic of RSS, that will be broadcast to all of your classes. It could also be useful in the dissemination of general announcements: office hour changes, out sick, etc.

There are two other places where we've included feeds in this classroom. On the main welcome page, there is a link to "Business News from Afar." Clicking on that takes you to a page where 5 different feeds are pulled in. Some from the New York Times business section, others from MSNBC, Newsweek, and Forbes Magazine, etc. These feeds can offer frequently updated news information for your students. You can find, using the techniques that Barret mentioned earlier, feeds relevant to almost any area of study. There are RSS feeds pertaining to anthropology, sociology, economics, etc. So, while this example focuses primarily on business, the feeds you choose are entirely up to you.

Also in this class, I've added an organizer page to the course menu called "News by Topic." In here we see 3 links. This is an example of how you could set up a variety of reading themes for your students.

The first, "Management", collects threads from three different sources that focus specifically on issues of management. The second collects news from much more general sources - top stories from the Washington Post, the NY Times, and Newsweek. You could build pages like this to collect threads from a variety of related sources.

Okay, so popular website and news sources are one thing. And they're certainly conversation fodder. The articles that students can have piped directly to them can initiate thought on a variety of current topics, and keep your classrooms vibrant by constantly adding new material without any effort from you. But what about peer reviewed materials? What about items from the subscription databases that all of your libraries have access to?

Well, librarians have been asking database vendors those questions. While many vendors are working with the idea, Proquest already has some feeds available.

http://www.proquest.com/proquest/rss/rss.shtml

So far, they've only made a few RSS feeds available coming out of their ABI/Inform database. There are about 70 different feeds available on a wide range of business topics. Basically, whenever a new article is added to the database that fits a specific set of criteria, it would pop up in your class. Also, I emailed a Proquest representative and learned that they are hoping to introduce customizable feeds at some point in the not too distant future. This would allow users to create, for example, a feed that would pull from Proquest articles that matched a specific search string. Also, a company named Innovative Interfaces is also starting to explore RSS. Innovative is a company that does online catalogs for many libraries worldwide. I know that they're talking about making patron record RSS feeds available, which will be great, if not entirely useful in a classroom context. However, we can also hope that they build feeds in in other ways. Keep your eyes on your college library's catalog!

So far we've learned what RSS is, and we've seen some examples of how it might be useful in your experience as professors of online courses. The hard part, of course, is the technical aspect of actually getting that content into your course. Happily, there's a guy named Alan Levine at the Maricopa County Community Colleges in the Phoenix area who has created a little tool that handles most of it for you.

A little hunting, some minor configuring, a copy and a paste and you've got fresh info streaming into your class. I'll walk you through an example, all the way from finding the feed through getting it to display in your classroom.

Say for example you were interested in pulling feeds into your classroom from The Economist. First you would go to their website and find the link on their homepage that points to their RSS feeds. Here it's linked under the heading of "Services" in the left sidebar. Clicking on that link reveals that the site publishes two feeds - a weekly one and a daily one. Let's grab the daily one.

First we would right click over the "RSS" icon, and depending on your browser, you'll select "copy shortcut" or "copy link location" or some such. Once we have that copied, we then need to go to the Feed2JS website, where that icon will be magically transformed into usable code for us.

http://www.feed2js.org

Click on the "Build" tab and you'll find a text-input box prompting you for the URL of the feed. Enter it into that box, and use the following options to configure the feed to your liking. Most of the options will be fine in the default, but I would encourage you to alter 3 of the defaults:

• Number of items to display: while leaving this at the default of "show all available" is fine, it may overwhelm your students on really active feeds. you may want to choose to limit to 3-5 items.
• Use HTML in item display: Checking yes here will allow all links in the news items imported to retain links, etc.
• Target links in new window: In WebCT it's a good idea to take advantage of this. Entering a "y" in the box here will launch a new window when a student clicks on a news item. If you don't do this, the item will open in a frame inside your WebCT shell, and won't allow your students to completely navigate the site.

After you have the options configured to your liking, you can preview the feed using the "Preview" button at the bottom of the options page. If you want to make any changes to the options at this point, you can. Once you're happy with the results, click on the "Generate JavaScript" button at the very bottom of the page. Feed2JS automatically generates the script for you. On this page, highlight and copy the code. Next we'll take it to WebCT.

Once in your WebCT shell, click on "Control Panel" >> Manage Files >> Create File.

Place your mouse in the "File Content" box and paste the code that we copied from Feed2JS, save the file, and preview. You'll notice that the text here is not styled. On the Feed2JS site, there are several CSS styles that you can steal under the tab of "Style." Even if you're not familiar with CSS, you can do this. Simply choose a style, preview, and copy the CSS. Then you would paste that code into the beginning of the "File Content" window, just before the JavaScript code.

 

 

So that's about it. Today Barret gave you a quick look at what RSS can do and ways in which it is commonly used. Then, he showed you how you can use a feed aggregator to get all of those feeds roped together in the same place. After that, I took you on a quick tour of a WebCT classroom that uses RSS syndication to pull in current articles from a variety of sources, and then did a cursory demo of how to make that happen in your own WebCT classrooms.