Last March, I conducted several email interviews to prepare my column about Real Simple Syndication (RSS) for the June 2006 issue of University Business: “RSS: The Next Big Thing in University Web Communications.â€
Dan Karleen, THE higher ed guru from the blog Syndication for Higher Ed, answered these questions last March.
1) Why did you decide to launch the edu feed directory? Can you tell us a bit more about it?
In late 2004, as part of my work with Thomson Peterson’s college search products, I became interested in learning about what schools were doing with syndication formats such as RSS and Atom. I began collecting these syndicated feeds, and ended up with a couple hundred feeds from college and university websites in my aggregator. Not only was it becoming too much to manage on my own, but I also felt that if we opened it up as an online directory project, schools would submit their own feeds, and people who were interested in subscribing to school updates via RSS or Atom could do so easily. Since we launched the directory in August, 2005, many schools have contributed their own feeds. Education blogs and school websites have started to link to the directory, and the steady stream of visitors to the directory suggests that it’s a helpful resource.
2) What are the most interesting applications of RSS you’ve observed in higher ed?
Even though we’re still early in the adoption cycle, it’s difficult to find an area of higher education that hasn’t latched onto RSS. Recognizing that prospective students are beginning to prefer to consume information via RSS, some schools such as Seattle University are offering admission-oriented feeds. Faculty members and students are offering RSS feeds from their blogs. Next to bloggers and school newsrooms, libraries are the heaviest adopters of RSS. Many libraries are offering feeds containing information about their latest acquisitions, which is a great way drive interest in what the library has to offer. There are a few cases of schools experimenting with RSS to facilitate communications among faculty, staff, and students. The Kogod School of Business at American University is one example. Last fall, the school issued RSS-enabled Blackberries to graduate students, and announced that RSS was replacing email as the primary way students would receive their day-to-day information.
3) What role will RSS play in the next 5 years on campuses? How do you think its use(s) will evolve?
In five years, the idea of RSS as a “techie†phenomenon will be a distant memory, and many will have recognized the value of RSS as a way to speed the process of research and learning. RSS will be seamlessly integrated into many important applications on campus, such as student portals and course management systems, and schools will begin to use intelligent tools to aggregate feeds and make them more useful for their constituents. Multi-way applications of RSS will facilitate day-to-day communications among students, faculty, and staff. RSS-enabled applications on cell phones are also likely to see a lot of use on campus, particularly for information like campus news alerts, events around town, and so on—in many cases as a replacement for email and other forms of communication. RSS will grow as an enabler of online learning and blended on-campus/online programs, particularly as the delivery of media files in mp3 and mp4 via RSS becomes more common. In the classroom, instructors will subscribe to student feeds containing completed homework assignments, and instructors will be able to offer feedback via RSS. Research will benefit from more universal RSS adoption, making findings more widely shareable and searchable. External RSS feeds on school websites will be nearly ubiquitous as more schools move to web content management systems that are RSS-enabled, and schools will continue to align their external communications resources toward their RSS offerings to meet growing demand for information in this form.
