tech » Feeds

Start with this quick introduction video if you are not familiar at all with feeds:

In short- Feeds move content from one place to another. They can bring it to your desktop if you use a feed reader (kind of like email for feeds) or it can move content from one website to another.

First let's look at

1) Bringing Feeds to Your Desktop

As the video above shows, it saves a ton of time to have information delivered to you. RSS feeds deliver information to you only when something has changed. This makes it easy to keep up with a bunch of blogs, or with a work group (as long as they are using tools that are feed compatible.)

If you are going to do a collaborative project with someone and you plan to use online tools, start by setting yourself up with a Feed / RSS reader. This will increase your communication efficiency and increase your chances of success.

If you are an institution who will be working collaboratively with Swift Kick, setting up and using an RSS readers is a requirement. We use so many different free online tools, the only way they can be coordinated is by centralizing the information in an RSS reader as you saw in the video above.

2) Using Feeds to Link Content From Different Websites

For instance, here is a feed from the Student Affairs Blog. You could click on that link and go to the page, or you could just read the latest headlines on this page:

because I've embedded a feed from that blog into this wikispace. The feed makes those headlines "live". If there are new posts at that blog the feed will automatically update this page. No extra work for me.

This is a huge point. Students expect content to be "live." If you have information, calendars for instance, that need to be updated by a person, chances are pretty good that person will become an information bottleneck and the content will get out of date. Students will realize this, and stop going to that page for information. As students don't use it, the motivation for the updater will dwindle ("no one reads it anyway"), the content gets more out of date, and the negative feedback loop winds down, frustrating for everyone.

Feeds are a great way to "Go to them" and spread your content to lots of places without having to work to keep it current. If you are using a blogging platform (typepad, blogger, etc.) or a wiki (mediawiki, wikispaces, etc.) they all provide feeds that you can use to deliver information to you, deliver information to other sites, or both. Feeds offer numerous interesting ways to put together content. We're constantly discovering new uses all the time.

Find a list of feed readers here.