My Week With RSS

In my week with RSS I feel like I have turned a corner in my knowledge of the internet. Formerly, I would spend countless hours checking in on all the websites I frequent; only getting sporadic updates and getting endlessly sidetracked by advertisements and little nonsense stories. However, by using the RSS feed I was able to see only what I wanted to see, and keep track of many things in one easy to use and manage place.

What I like the most about RSS is that it is technology that takes things more to their basics rather than making them more complicated. RSS just boils the internet down to the essentials by showing you only what you are looking for and reducing the “noise” that generally accompanies websites. Finally, here is a technology that actually makes things easier and better.

As far as its uses in an educational setting I see it as being more useful as a tool for instructors rather than for students. If a teacher created a blogging assignment in which the students had to update their blogs through the week it would cut down on his grading time to be able to check the status of all the blogs in one place rather than going to all of them each time. However, I did have one interesting idea of how students could use RSS. In a social studies class, the students could be asked to subscribe to a number of news websites and track the differences in how they reported each day’s top stories, looking for bias or sketchy facts.

So, in the end I suppose there are ways it could be useful for all participants in the classroom, but I think that the use on the administrative side is much stronger.