5th WSEAS / IASME International Conference on ENGINEERING EDUCATION (EE'08), Heraklion, Greece, July 22-24, 2008 Educational Use and Importance of RSS Luminiţa Giurgiu , Ghiţă Bârsan , Dan Moşteanu Technical Sciences “Nicolae Bălcescu” Land Forces Academy 3-5 Revoluţiei Street, 550170 Sibiu ROMÂNIA Abstract: - The elearning world is rapidly changing. The technology is getting easier to use and each upgrade adds increased functionality. Personal development depends on getting new information and understanding what’s happening around us. There are a lot of good resources available and the challenge is actually seeing the information. RSS is still not a very familiar technology; however, it's already very obvious what role RSS will be playing in the future of the Internet. Because the web has become a sprawling network of different services, RSS is helping the web connect these services in an organized fashion – the new Web 2.0. In the coming few years, RSS will definitely be seen on every website and blog. Some RSS ideas, directions and solutions are revealed here, for teachers and instructors, in order to get benefits of using RSS in education. Key-Words: - syndication, RSS, RSS feed, Rich Site Summary, feeds 1 Introduction http://www.technorati.com, http://www.ousub.com, Really Simple Syndication feeds have been http://www.syndic8.com. growing in popularity with Web sites that produce Professors and students might think to embrace written, audio and video content because they offer RSS as a means to educate [2]. Academia, a convenient way for readers to subscribe to what educational institutions are using RSS feeds in their they are interested to, delivering any updates daily routines and this fact demonstrates that RSS almost immediately and maintaining traffic and can be utilized in very different ways. Taking all stickiness to the sites. these in consideration, the power of the RSS can be The strength of RSS is its simplicity. The content successfully used in the educational domain, some comes to us instead of going to get it! It is directions being discussed in the next subsections. exceptionally easy to syndicate website content using RSS. The types of feeds commonly find on web sites are RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom. These are 2.1 Blogs and Blogs Comments the structures that organize content which is being Many blogs are catalogued in an RSS feed, with updated so others can easily retrieve it. This content each blog entry summarized as a feed item. This could be as well articles, blog posts, and PDF or .ppt makes it easy for students to scan blog posts for documents, as photos, audio or video files. items of interest. Starting a classroom blog to use for posting important information and sharing web resources, students can easily keep track of the 2 The Power of Feeds in Education content posted to the blog through the RSS feed. By creating individual feeds for courses, professors can While RSS feeds started as a way to aggregate news choose a few key resources, while students get the into one application, the possible uses for educators benefit of a subject specific feed. go far beyond the basics [1]. The RSS syndication feature can be used also Web content became a powerful communication to monitor the comments in the blog when using tool by the help of feeds. RSS feeds were most comment feature to encourage collaboration among commonly found in news web sites or blogs, but students and professors. Some blogs offer a multiple now it is natural to see them on any web sites that author feature which allows students to work are updated frequently. There are also many together on single project. All the postings are directories dedicated to help finding RSS feeds on aggregated in a central area, but each student can topics of specific and personal interests, like contribute to the main space or comment on another http://www.bloglines.com, students work. Using a class blog, the professor might try having students respond to his posts and ISBN: 978-960-6766-86-2 211 ISSN: 1790-2769 5th WSEAS / IASME International Conference on ENGINEERING EDUCATION (EE'08), Heraklion, Greece, July 22-24, 2008 track the feeds, rather than each student doing his and search and the nowadays web which seems to own blog [3]. be overflowing with sites pumping out RSS and Atom feeds on a regular basis. The idea of creating RSS feeds for search terms 2.2 RSS and Social Bookmarking is especially interesting because once a student RSS in conjunction with social bookmarking can be wants to do a project or a paper on specific topic, used to create a set of resources accessible on any that student could actually create an RSS feed that computer connected to the internet, to conduct would bring any news about the topic to his research and share that research with peers and track aggregator as soon as it was published [4]. authors and book updates. First case is when create RSS feeds for news In order to realize that, an account at searches: say students want to create a feed for http://del.icio.us/ or http://www.furl.net/ will be what’s in the daily news about a particular topic. created to store, sort and share the web sites that They can make a syndicated feed of search results professor feels having worthwhile information for of Google News, so they have to take the following his students and colleagues. This way, he will share feed address and add their search terms where his del.icio.us and furl bookmarks with his class indicated. So, for instance, if they want to have a using their RSS feeds. feed for the search term “rss and weblog” it would look like: http://news.google.com/news?q=%22rss+weblog%2 2.3 Discussion Board 2&output=rss. Copying that address and paste it into If the professor feels that a discussion board better Bloglines aggregator, anyone start getting any news suit the needs of the class than a blog, he can that’s in the media about the topic right away. successfully use a discussion board like Second case is when create RSS feeds for http://server.com/communityapps/discussionapp/, weblog searches: getting a regular feed of searches which are offering RSS feeds for interested in the blogosphere is just as easy, but say the participants to keep track of discussions. professor might want to experiment with searching Quick Topic - http://www.quicktopic.com/ posts on his own before bringing students into the helps to create a disposable discussion board that fray. The easiest way is to go to Feedster.com and can be used with students. The professor can create type in the search terms. On the page of results, the a discussion board, invite contributors, and 2.0 RSS box will be seen and when clicked on will subscribe to the discussion RSS feed to keep track of give a number of standard newsreaders to choose contributors. from: if logged in at Bloglines, a click on the Bloglines link will automatically add it to his account. Another option is Technorati.com which is 2.4 Sharing RSS Feeds a leader in indexing weblog content. Once signed up If students want to share feed lists or subject specific for a free membership, students can create what feeds list with each other, the solution is called Technorati calls watchlists: each watchlist created OPML. Sharing a list of feeds around specific topics has it’s own RSS feed that can be added to or on a subject area that includes research, blogs and Bloglines. other feeds implies the use of an Outline Processor Third case is when create RSS feeds for Markup Language (OPML) file to import complete website searches. There is some more: students can RSS lists to a news aggregator. even create an RSS feed from a search of Google By the use of such a file, students can link to sites, so, if there is new content about some topic a list of RSS feeds and import them into another added to a site that’s already on the Internet, or if news aggregator to share with peers. The professor there is a whole new site created about the topic, can use OPML to create a linked list of all his he’ll find out about it in his aggregator. Going to students’ subscription list on a particular topic and http://www.googlealert.com/, the web's leading publish it in a central space so that all students can solution for monitoring professional interests benefit from the feeds colleagues have found. online and sign up for an account, once registered, up to three searches can be created that can bring back up to 150 results total. Feed addresses 2.5 Web Searches and Research obtained at the end of the process will be copied Let's think about the differences between the web into the Bloglines account. where Google and Yahoo were built to crawl, index, It is also possible to create a metasearch feed by building a library of exemplary search feeds for ISBN: 978-960-6766-86-2 212 ISSN: 1790-2769 5th WSEAS / IASME International Conference on ENGINEERING EDUCATION (EE'08), Heraklion, Greece, July 22-24, 2008 students to scaffold research for projects or use Using the Groups feature of the Blogdigger site, and http://www.Gada.be to quickly create a metasearch entering the various feed addresses wanted to be feed. This is an excellent tool for searching blogs, combined, Blogdigger gives this new feed a unique news and web search feeds with a single step.