RSS

RSS (Source: Geralt, goo.gl/lyM1KP, under CC0 Public Domain licence)

RSS is a web 2.0 tool which allows users to easily create personalised newsfeeds – actually news aggregators – drawing on the collective intelligence of the wider web. RSS services are also available in mobile app versions, and thus have some connection with mobile learning. Over a number of years, RSS has declined in popularity relative to more automated social networking and social media newsfeeds, but it still offers value for education.

RSS refers to ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and facilitates the setting up of newsfeeds, or news aggregators, composed of automatically updated content in a centralised location. This means that if you set up a newsfeed from websites of interest (such as media sites or blogs), it will be automatically updated whenever the original sites are updated. (Note that an alternative to RSS, Atom, can also be used to underpin newsfeeds.) Like folksonomies, RSS feeds are about pulling together distributed content from across the web but, unlike folksonomies, they provide a constant stream of up-to-date information in real time from preselected sources.

Educators can set up RSS feeds on relevant topics, or students can work together to set up group or class feeds on topics they are studying. Setting up a newsfeed to draw updates from other sites into your own website, blog or wiki allows you to incorporate others’ views and perspectives alongside your own, potentially leading to the co-construction of knowledge within a new frame.

RSS feed icon (Source: OpenClipart-Vectors, goo.gl/u9lHUU, under CC0 Public Domain licence)

For a light-hearted and simple explanation of how RSS works, you might like to take a look at the Common Craft video RSS in Plain English. To start with, you need to select websites which have RSS (or Atom) webfeeds, which may be signalled by the icon above, and subscribe to them (which is free of cost). Such webfeeds are typically found on sites that are updated on a regular basis, such as media websites, blogs or podcasting sites. There are three main set-up options, as follows:

• • to set up a standalone online aggregator, you can use services like Feedly (now with a paid Feedly AI option), FeedReader Online or Flipboard, which create pages built around your nominated sources. Online aggregators are generally available in mobile app versions, and there are also dedicated RSS apps. (Note that the formerly popular Google Reader was retired in 2013, and Bloglines was retired in 2015; the demise of these services points to a trend away from manually setting up such newsfeeds.) For more options, see Wikipedia’s Comparison of Feed Aggregators.
  • to use inbuilt RSS functionality in a general website or dashboard service, you can check out the inbuilt widgets on Netvibes, Protopage or other services listed on the websites page.
  • to manually build RSS functionality into a pre-existing webpage, blog or wiki, you can use a separate widget service such as Feedwind or RSS Feed Widget (for an example of the former in use, see the Blogs to follow page of this website).

For an example of a more static aggregator tool, check out Symbaloo, which allows weblinks to be collected on a central dashboard; other options are covered on the Folksonomies page of this website. Variations on the concept of news updates include Google Alerts, a service which regularly emails users newly published results corresponding to Google searches on terms of their choice. IFTTT is a  sophisticated service that allows users to create rules to connect and automate actions across digital platforms and/or devices.

Last update: July 2024.