I am now coming to understand feeds and rss as the muscles that move the web. They are the tissue that seems to push and pull all of the information that I care about. Unfortunately, many sites still do not open up their content to rss feeds.
Well, instead of waiting for them to open it up, I can take matters into my own hands and construct my own rss feeds using http://www.dapper.net. Much like greasemonkey, Dapper allows you to choose which ares of a webpage are important and then select them for inclusion in the rss feed (or exclusion on your browser in the case of greasemonkey). So, what does this have to do with learning?
Well, if I can make anything into a feed, then I can make anything on demand for others. I can make any webpage that was created before “web 2.0” into something that can be fed into an email subscription, an aggregator, or a portal. This opens up all content to redistribution in a format of your own choosing. So, put everything at students’ fingertips. Aggregate everything. Seriously.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Everything as a feed.
Author: Ben Wilkoff
