The highly touted (well maybe in my mind) right side feature of the CDB site, Google of the Week is actually a poor person’s RSS feed, probably one of the easiest ways to syndicate content is to link to a search that produces a customized query result.
This week, just to highlight the silliness of definitions, we feature a google on learning object definition. What do 4700+ results tell us?
Not much. Or too much?
Scott at EdTechPost recently blogged about a desire for an RSS feed from the Low Threshold Applications site, a collection of how-tos for teachers, designed to be powerful tasks they can do with a minimum of fuss.
The LTA site is one of those ideal for RSS-ifying: there is a regular format of content, updated over time and can be farther reaching if there were some quick ways to scan the content.
Scott took a cut at doing the “myrss” approach, a site that takes any web URL and tries to turn it into RSS. This is a shotgun approach, beacuse it more or less grabs the links it can, lacks description fields, and often gets links that are not really the content you want in a feed. Ugh.
Anyhow, I just wrote the LTA folks a quick guide for them to create and edit an RSS feed using an online tool. They should have it on their site soon, but I did a test version them as a starting point.
No one should ever, ever, be writing RSS by hand! The XML format is very picky (for good reasons), but WebReference does have a spiffy online tool to make it easy to edit your own RSS files, and modify them once you have them online.
For those that have beeing following (or not) the Learning Object experiment’s here (see Back to TrackBack), we have applied the MovableType Trackback concept to every item in the Maricopa Learning eXchange.
With some time to tinker today, I cooked up a new trackback summary tool that allows one to check out the trackbacks across our site. It is ugly, ugly code, a very un-elegant hack, but it is a concept that can illustrate (maybe) what the potnetial is for TrackBack and Learning Objects.
So what?
The more you click around the web, the more you see information rich sites that could do a little bit more good by adding RSS feeds to their content. It’s even worse when you scan the URLs and sense that the content is idling away in a database. Like Clara Peller’s inquiry for beef, we are wondering, “Where’s the Feed?”
Both myself and D’Arcy Norman implemented it into our learning object collection sites in a matter of a few hours. Here is just a scoop of sites that should be adding the little orange link box.. 
Judging from the content structure and top links. I think these are all from the same folks, the Arts & Letters Daily, Business Daily Review, SciTech Daily – all of these sites feature RSS like headinlines on the fron page- a blurb a link that lead to a full story. Where’s the feed?
a blog/wiki paper for the July 11, 2003 LOVCOP teleconference
Learning Objects Virtual Community of Practice
http://www.educause.edu/vcop/learningobjects/
Alan Levine, Maricopa Community Colleges
Brian Lamb, University of British Columbia
D’Arcy Norman, University of Calgary
Casting aside stuffy academic papers and endless PowerPoint bullets, we will present our ideas on RSS and learning objects via a collection of connected blog entries assembled in a wiki. Use the medium to communicate about the medium.
Abstract:
Customized collections of learning objects from multiple repositories are achieved with simple, existing RSS protocols, creating access to a wider range of objects than a single source. This provides discipline-specific windows into collections, contextual wrappers via blogging tools, and a system for connecting objects and implementations via TrackBack.
Visit TheFuss wiki for the relevant sources covered in the talk (and then some) plus our own blog entries for what has been a loosely coordinated and quickly moving idea since February 2003. [see a static snapshot of TheFuss wiki]
Look for this presentation also at the coveted last time slot of the Aug 5-8, 2003 MERLOT conference.
Ahhhh, it is a tough job but someone (not me) has to go to Hawaii for the Learning Objects Symposium 2003, part of the ED-MEDIA 2003 conference.
Learning Objects on the beach. Awesome.
Actually this looks like a worthy all day focus on LOs with some world experts, and this site has all of the papers. It will take some time to wade through them (fairly academic in nature and tone).
“I could have had class. I could have been a contender. Instead of what I am, a bum”
In the July/August 2003 Technology Source, Mary Harrsch makes a claim (#623?) for RSS – The Next Killer App For Education.
As blogged by David and George, the slapping of “kller app” may be over the top, but it helps to spread the word a bit.. even if the author has completely neglected the RSS work happening right around here somewhere and up in the northern hintelands of Canada 😉
The “obligatory legal” statement in the footer at Heather Champ’s blog, harrumph! scared me enough. I would not mess with it 😉
It’s been a jam packed day at the New Media Consortium 2003 summer conference in lovely (humid) Blacksburg Virginia (Hokie-land, Virginia Tech).
The Maricopa Learning eXchange got a large dose of exposure today, and I am thinking many people are going home thinking “Gotta do a Google on RSS”
Yesterday’s workshop, or “blogshop” for faculty at Chandler-Gilbert Community college went very well. It was much to cover (and most was not) in 2 hours, but we got many of these teachers excited, curious, interested in the tools available via a blog. The blog provides all of the information needed to do this as a […]
