Robin Ladouceur, Instructional Designer, Instructional Technology Group (ITG) introduced the Educause handout, 7 Things You Should Know RSS Feeds and the ITG RSS Primer, which can accessed by emailing itg@yale.edu. RSS has been an acronym for various things over the years but currently stands for Really Simple Syndication, in other words, it is an online subscription method. The RSS icon 
is the visual indicator when a web site has RSS content.
Common Craft “In Plain English” video on RSS, RSS: In Plain English. This video is an excellent introduction to RSS and feed readers. After showing this short video, Robin showed the free RSS reader www.feedreader.com and explained the limitations of readers that need to be downloaded to your computer. Basically, these readers can only be accessed from one computer whereas networked readers such as Google or Yahoo can be accessed from multiple computers simply by logging into your account. Robin also demonstrated how to use your Safari or Firefox bookmarks toolbar for subscribing to a RSS feed.
Other readers shown were Bloglines, Netvibes (which allows you to build a website based on RSS feeds), and Google Reader. Robin really recommends Google Reader because of the powerful ways you can catagorize your feeds by folder and the keyboard shortcuts that make using the reader very easy and efficient.
Barbara Stuart, English Lecturer, is teaching an English 114 course on the Election 2008. This fall ITG set up a blog and RSS feeds to support the student work in the course. English 114 is a writing course with a research component. At the start of the class, Professor Stuart asked the student where they find their information and it broke down into 3 tiers: Tier 1 resources were internet resources found primarily through Google; Tier 2 resources were magazine articles; and Tier 3 were peer-reviewed literature found through library resources. An early assignment had students do a rhetorical analysis of a blog and the students discovered that blogs can actually be good places to go for information. The students then set up their own blog for posting their writing assignments. In the past, Professor Stuart has used the Classes server to generate student discussion inside and outside of class. This semester she used the blog for this purpose and she found that students tend to write more on the blog than then they did on the classes server.
Professor Stuart found that the writing on the blog was very good, especially with students whose first language is not English. She found that the students wrote better for the web, potentially because all their peers were reading it instead of just the professor. She also found that the blog enabled discussions that were broader than the in-class discussions because the intimidation factor was not as much of an issue.
The students were drawing upon information for their posts from the information they read via RSS feeds from political blogs and news sources. These RSS feeds were aggregated on the blog via feeds and these feeds were created by ITG, Professor Stuart and the students themselves.
Professor Stuart was asked if the RSS feeds made it possible to offer more sides of the story than you might be able to do with paper readings. She thought the feeds did offer a broader perspective, allowed students to participate in chosing the readings, and most importantly, it was fun for the students. The RSS reader was seamlessly integrated into the blog thereby making it very easy for students to organize their reading in the same space as their writing.
Some conclusions: The students did a really great job with their writing on the blog and they were thinking in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise. The anonomity of the posts was liberating for the students. This is their medium and they were able to do very good academic work in this format because it is comfortable for them. They engaged in a balanced exchange of ideas and were pushed to look at issues in different ways and deal with other points of view.