The Fuss about RSS - Summary

I just attended a teleconference where Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, and Alan Levine presented The Fuss about RSS (this wiki links to a lot of resources, tutorials, and information). They did a great job! Some of their statements:

• Weblogs have shown the value of RSS as a means of loosely connecting people of varied interests…allowing them to come together and complete projects.
• Much of existing development on respositories has focused on ways to get things in…but not much on getting things out.
• RSS is a tool to pull resources out of the existing silo’s
• The value of RSS is that the user doesn’t need to do “anything special” to take advantage of it…just follow your regular routine. As you publish resources, they are automatically syndicated.
• RSS allows users to integrate learning objects into anything - webpage, BlackBoard, WebCT…
• The flexibility of RSS is that it allows people to do what they want with the learning objects - subscribe only to select subset, last 10…allowing them to create a personalized collection.

A few thoughts:

• Explaining RSS is like explaining sex. You just don’t get it until you do it.
• People seem uncomfortable with the simplicity of RSS. RSS is simply a protocol/means to share information. That’s it. For some reason, users want it to be much more. I think its simplicity is its strength.
• I don’t think many people are aware of just how developed/advanced RSS is in the blogging community. RSS has been around for years…but the people who are aware of it (and who use it) are primarily bloggers. Alan, D’Arcy, and Brian are advocating a new use for an existing technology.
• Within the educational community, many things need to happen to extend the use of RSS - digital rights management, means of easily integrated discovered objects into courses, a way to effectively search LO’s that have been distributed via RSS, etc. This will take time. As was noted during the presentation - this is really just the beginning…the potential is just started to be explored.
• To understand the role of RSS in an educational context, intereseted parties should start by downloading an aggregator (several are listed in the presentation link) and subscribing to existing blogs.