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Good Article on RSS for Learning

Sunday, May 30th, 2004

 

TREND May 2004

 

RSS: A Learning Technology
By Eva Kaplan-Leiserson

 

 

This
article is first in a quarterly series of articles that will discuss
learning technology trends in the distance or spotlight technology
trends and examine their applicability to learning.

 

Some
people call it the next World Wide Web. Some say tools like it will
replace LMSs and LCMSs. What is it? RSS, which is known to some as Rich Site Summary, others as RDF (Resource Description Framework) Site Summary, and still others as Really Simple Syndication.
But it’s not the acronym that’s important, it’s the result: a means of
driving content directly from its producer to its recipient
automatically, almost instantaneously, and without interference from
viruses, spam, or other modern day electronic pests.

 

This
article will help you understand not only what RSS is, but also why
it’s getting the hype it is in the world of content, what its potential
is in the learning arena, and how it’s already being used in
educational settings.

 

Definition and history

 

In her excellent primer on RSS, “What is RSS and Why Should You Care?,”
writer, editor, and trainer Amy Gahran describes the technology in a
way that non-techies can easily understand. She explains that an RSS
“feed” is a type of electronic file written in the XML formatting
language (similar to HMTL, but with user-defined parameters), which
contains information about content on a Website—for example, a headline
and summary or excerpt.

 

 

RSS defined in 10 words or fewer

Signal vs. Noise

What
makes RSS innovative is the way in which this feed is delivered and
used. RSS files are created by content publishers and then delivered to
people who have subscribed to that feed using a “feed reader”
application (also called a news aggregator). The feed reader program
checks with the originator of the content regularly and if it finds any
new content available from a particular site, downloads the information
about it, called metadata, into the application automatically.

 

A
person can subscribe to multiple feeds using a feed reader and then
read, all in one screen, what new feeds have come into the program. He
or she can then click on the headline of an item to go to the
originating Website and access the full article.

 

RSS helps users keep up with new content on online news sites and Weblogs (blogs)
and can replace email updates or HTML newsletters. Content publishers
can notify subscribers of their newest content automatically without
having to keep track of email addresses or worrying that an email or
HTML newsletter will get lost in the pool of spam and virus-laden
messages.

 

Beyond
personal use, RSS feeds can also be used to republish, or syndicate,
content on Websites. For example, an electrical engineer who writes a
Weblog for his in-house colleagues could syndicate feeds from various
electrical engineering publications on the site, and provide the latest
news to his readers without composing it himself. This is entirely
legal and not a copyright violation because the links to read the
content send the user back to the originating site.

 

RSS
was developed in 1999, but it’s taken off recently because of the
increasing amount of information people are trying to take in,
especially through nontraditional sources such as blogs. Although
currently most RSS feeds are text-based and received via a desktop
computer, technology experts point out the potential for more flexible
use. Audio and video files or other multimedia content can be sent via
RSS, and many mobile devices, such as cell phones or PDAs, can receive
RSS feeds as well.  

 

(Note: There are several different standards for RSS currently. See http://www.ourpla.net/cgi-bin/pikie.cgi?RssStandards
for more on this. Most reader applications work with multiple
standards. Which standard you use to create your own feed depends on
what you want to do with it, but experts often recommend version 2.0
for most applications.) 

 

RSS and learning

 

It’s
not just the ability of RSS to get large amounts of content to people
quickly that makes it an useful educational technology. Intrepid
pioneers are harnessing the capability of RSS and metadata to do some
very exciting things in the learning arena.

 

Prescient learning technologiest Stephen Downes discussed the usefulness of RSS with online courses back in 2000 in his article “Content Syndication and Online Learning.”
He wrote, “[Using RSS or similar tools], any course…can tap into
up-to-date resources from remote sources…[so that] content is tailored
specifically for the course.”

 

Ways in which instructors can use RSS for or in courses include

  • subscribing to feeds on certain topics to stay current
  • publishing syndicated content on course Websites or blogs
  • having learners create their own blogs and then subscribing to the feeds of all those blogs to check new content on them
  • notifying learners about new available courses
  • updating learners on new internal or external resources available on a training topic
  • subscribing
    to feeds from learning object repositories to see the newest objects
    added or objects added in a topic they’re developing a course on.

(Several of those uses were proposed in “Blogging and RSS: The ‘What’s It?’ and “How To’ of Powerful New Web Tools for Educators,” published by Information Today.)

 

It’s
this last use that’s creating the most buzz in the online learning
arena, primarily among higher education institutions that are starting
to contribute to and benefit from learning object repositories that
house and share chunks of content. A growing list of repositories now
offer RSS feeds that announce when new objects are added or send search
results on keywords or disciplines automatically to aggregator
applications or Websites.

 

At least six repositories around the world offer RSS feeds of learning objects to the public (see resource list). Downes, whose EduSource project
is a Canadian network of learning object repositories that’s now going
global, says that what constitutes a learning object in these
repositories varies based on the person who submitted it. Some are
fully contained learning objects that follow the SCORM model; others
are plain images. The trick, he says, is to make the metadata
sufficiently descriptive so the person accessing it knows what he or
she is getting.

 

Beyond LMSs and LCMSs


Learning
object repositories that let users contribute and access objects
developed by others outside their organizations haven’t taken off in
the corporate world. The model thus far has been to use expensive LMSs
and LCMSs to house learning objects and keep them locked up in the
companies that developed them. This is perhaps because of proprietary
information and intellectual property concerns at businesses. However,
what if another model were possible? What if those issues could be
worked out and the distributed model of learning object repositories
seen in the higher education arena could be transferred to the
corporate world?

 

Rather
than collecting content in a central repository, requiring an expensive
software application, the RSS model distributes content across the
World Wide Web, allowing access piece by piece. “For that reason,”
Downes says in his article “An Introduction to RSS for Educational Designers” that “the
distribution of content over the Internet will look a lot more like an
RSS network than…an enterprise content management system.” More people
will use the distributed learning object network “not only because it’s
easier and cheaper, but because they can access much more content for
much less money.”

 

In 2003, Downes created an RSS format specifically for learning objects, RSS-LOM. In “RSS: The Next Killer App for Education,” author
Mary Harrsch says the format will make distribution of learning objects
to courses possible without using LMSs or having to work through a
publisher. RSS-LOM isn’t implemented in any currently available
software, but Downes says products in development will support it. “The
age of the LMS is over,” he says. “If you’re going to spend [several
hundred thousand dollars], it would make more sense to spend it
directly on content.”

 

Digital rights management tools would make that possible. Downes is developing for eduSource tools
and resources to support the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL)
created by Renato Ianella, for learning object repository networks. The
language describes reuse conditions for content—as Downes is using it,
whether learning objects can be read, copied, printed, and so forth.

 

This is all pilot code at the moment, but the vision is that ODRL will work with other software that Downes terms learning object viewers
so that when a user requests download of an object, the software
consults the ODRL file and, if necessary, takes care of getting payment
for the object from credit card data or a PayPal account. Could this
type of software solve businesses’ copyright concerns and let learning
object repositories flourish in that world? Only time will tell. For
more on ODRL and learning objects, see the in-depth paper Downes recently released.  

 

What’s next?

Downes
paints the picture of the future of learning: A “desktop e-learning
application that plugs into the learning object repository network and
is able to search across a wide number of collections and retrieve
exactly the learning you want in a given circumstance.” This
application will be incorporated in other software, he says, after the
model of EPSS.
As the use of RSS and other metadata tools in the learning arena
continues to develop, new innovations will appear. One idea that’s
still in the conceptual stage is being worked on by Alan
Levine,instructional technologist at the Maricopa Center for Learning
& Instruction and developer of the Maricopa Learning Exchange
(MLX), a collection that includes learning objects as well as
activities, ideas, and teaching strategies created by faculty and staff
at the 10 Maricopa colleges. He’s working on a way that learning
objects can record automatically where they have been used, via the Trackback feature from Moveable Type blog software.  

The
information about the object’s use—Website title, URL, date, and brief
blurb—becomes part of the metadata on the object so that people
downloading it can see its prior contexts. Currently in the MLX, people
can enter this information manually, but beyond the Trackback feature
in blog software, there are no authoring tools out there yet that can
send that information back to repositories automatically. Levine wrote
about Trackback on his Weblog,
“[Keeping track of the object’s use] is rather important in my mind.
The object is now registering where else it is being used. It proves
reusability, one of the holy learning object grails!”

 

In a 2003 presentation with others at the MERLOT International Conference,
Levine said that what’s really needed are “intuitive authoring tools to
transfer learning objects from collections to instructional
environments” (and that would register back how they’re being used).

 

Currently,
learning objects gathered from repositories must be manually downloaded
and integrated. Downes says that process often takes lots of “tweaking,
poking, and prodding.” Eventually what will happen is that your
authoring tool will access repositories for you, Downes says. And on
the other end, the authoring tool you use to create content will also
create the metadata to easily share that content with others.

 

And
what about other technologies? Could RSS be integrated with other new
tools, such as the ones described in “We Learning”, parts I and II? Consider

  • a social networking tool that sends you a feed informing you of the new people who just joined the network
  • an
    expert management system that uses feeds to tell you when a new expert
    is added to the system in your area of interest, or when an expert has
    created a new document you might be interested in
  • collaborative workspaces that use feeds to bring in information people in the group need to complete a project
  • a
    problem-based RSS feed integrated with a social networking or expert
    management tool in which you could subscribe to a problem, for example
    “reluctant learners,” and then receive updates whenever someone writes
    on that topic.

Communications
and technology expert Luigi Canali De Rossi, known as Robin Good, sums
up the potential of RSS: “The creation of dedicated information
channels, originated by independent publishers and not by vested
commercial interests or mainstream media conglomerates, may create the
opportunity for a true renaissance of culture, learning, and to a
multiplication of our abilities to manage large amounts of rapidly
changing information.” 

 

 

Additional Resources

 

Feed aggregators, computer-based

 

Feed aggregator, Web-based

(useful if your company prevents you from installing computer-based programs)

 

How to create an RSS feed

 

Learning object repositories (higher education)

 

More articles on RSS in general 

More articles on RSS in learning

 

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Categories: RSS Aggregation, E-Learning, Learning 2.0 Services
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