Everything that does not have a home, just a big old stinking pile of posts.
Building on the code done for adding RSS to our DirectorWeb site, it took less than an hour to integrate it into our Teaching & Learning on the Web.
Once again, adding RSS was wonderfully simple.
You can find this new feed at
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tl/new.rss
Cogdogblog will be off-line between July 24 (6:00 pm PST) to July 28 (7:00 AM PST). There is some new power generator going in the building, and they are pulling the plug on all computers, networks, and servers. What will we do? Take a blog-break and going outside to chase some cats 😉
I have just hacked together a script to generate RSS feeds for the items posted to the front of Director Web, our long standing web resource site for users of Macromedia Director.
Although, I have not touched the inside of Director for about a year or two, this site still generates a pile of traffic, largely driven by the posted submissions for announcements to the front page.
It was just a little work (dusting off long forgotten perl) to add some code to create RSS feeds.
Wow, it is not even 15 minutes following our teleconference on “What’s The Fuss about RSS?” and already George has posted some great summary points, elearnspace blog: The Fuss about RSS – Summary.
How did I know? I glanced at my NetNewsWire RSS aggregatos and saw not only George’s new blog entry, but one from David, a modified PS from D’Arcy, and maybe more to come.
But I have to mention this great line from George’s post.
Okay folks. We have polished off most of the rough edges of the wiki part of our presentation on What’s the Fuss abour RSS? and are here tossing it out for your viewing.
Update (Sept 3, 2003) The wiki has been spiffed up and moved to http://careo.elearning.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TheFuss
This is just a pre-notice teaser for our upcoming LOVCOP teleconference on July 11, 2003: What’s the Fuss about RSS?. Tune in at 9 am Pacific, 10 am Mountain, 11 am Central, noon Eastern.
For access details (it is a toll free call), rush and click over to the LOVCOP site and sign up or email a request to LearningObjects@educause.edu.
On Friday you may even get a chance to sip some faux Merlot, and meet the (?) famous blogging duo of Boris and Lora.
After a bit of summer vacation (actually field work in Montana), Lora the Geologist (who is blogging about learning obejcts in geology) has found the news that About.com is now syndicating their content via RSS, and very quickly she has added a feed for their Geology collection to her site.
Each May we organize a year-end “Ocotillo” retreat for faculty and staff in our system to spend some focused time on instructional technology issues. This year, the theme was “Guess Who’s Coming To Learn?”:
What do we know about our students and their motivations for learning? Are our planning activities based on our own assumptions and experiences? There is plenty of literature about the various Gen-X, Gen-Y characteristics, but are we paying attention?
To better understand the attributes, desires, expectations of our current and future students, we have invited an expert in organizational and social demographics to help us figure out Who is Coming to Learn at Maricopa.
To help set the stage, we created the word Association activity. This was a quick and simple survey a number of faculty collected from their students, where we collected their first responses to some common educational and technical terms.
The results were fascinating.
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.
