05.20.06
RSS Curiosity
It is interesting how the concept of RSS feeds is finally beginning to take off. Last week I presented a webinar for the Instructional Technology Council (a community college consortium) and had 30 participants from all over the country. They asked some really good questions at the end of the presentation and we even went 15 minutes over our allotted time trying to answer them. My face-to-face session at their conference in Savannah, Georgia, last February was well-attended and participation from the group was excellent.
Yesterday, I got a call from a writer for Distance Education Report, a scholarly journal on distance education. We talked for 45 minutes as I explained RSS to him, how it works, and how it can be used in the classroom to create learning communities that are peer-to-peer, self-organizing, and easy to use in the classroom setting. We had a wonderful conversation about RSS. Even as a technical writer, he had no idea how it worked and was eager to understand not only how it worked, but how it could be used in education (particularly distance education).
This week I am presenting a double-session hands-on workshop and a 75 minute forum on using RSS, blogs, and wikis in learning communities. Again, these will be well-attended based upon pre-registrations. So it seems that interest in RSS technologies and how they work is rising. At the beginning of 2005, there was a major survey done of Internet users where one of the questions asked was if they had ever heard of RSS and, if so, whether or not they were using it. Only 5% responded that they knew what it was and only 1% were using it. Those figures have to be a lot higher now, as awareness has increased. It would be interesting to see that survey repeated now and to examine the results.
