Lisa’s (Online) Teaching Blog

My Program for Online Teaching newsletter this month contained the following advice:

Consider using RSS feeds for keeping track of trends in your discipline. All this means is having a page on the web that shows the “headlines” and summaries of newspaper articles, journals, blogs and other updated information as it comes in. One easy way to start is to go to Yahoo, set up an account, and click on My Yahoo! to create your page. You can even add movie times for the theatres near you, weather reports, and baseball scores! RSS just means that the source of the information releases it to be picked up by your page.

I had such trouble myself understanding RSS feeds and what they could do. I saw Donald Luck present it to me at a NSSA conference, I asked a few smart people, and I still didn’t get it. A couple of things helped. This video from Common Craft on YouTube:

Also, this web page by Stephanie Quilao: Explaining RSS the Oprah Way (from which this graphic was taken).

Then this morning, I was reading an article called Web 0.1 from Technology Review, and it mentioned a future vision from 22 years ago claiming that personal computers would include “news from several wire services” and I thought that’s it!. It’s like teletype! During the 1950s particularly, teletype machines received and printed news by subscription, for wire services like Associated Press. The sound of the machine was popular as a background for TV news shows and radio.

During the 1980s, I worked in a bank, and one of my jobs was checking the teletype machine, which would start printing by itself suddenly at odd times. So that’s what using RSS is. It’s subscribing to a service that feeds the news to you. Without the clack-clack-clack.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 5:36 pm and is filed under How To, Interactivity, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.