Wk11 - RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are an absolute blessing; I am totally sold on their ability to display all the details I wish to follow in one place. I started using Google Reader last year to help follow a few interesting sites to help grow my knowledge of information from various sources on professional websites and blogs in elearning. The convenience factor has grown this year when I realised that I could also host RSS feeds from other student’s blogs including those using OU blogs. Before this discovery I was spending much time individually visiting other people’s blogs and felt disappointed when I got here that nothing had changed since my last visit or I had missed sometimes a few days previous. As can be seen from the screen capture below Google Reader display all my feeds in one place.



Having visited a number of other blogs at the beginning of this course I saw how powerful RSS feeds could be to help keep track of other people’s blog comments in our tutor group by hosting RSS news feeds from other blogs. The snippet of information held in the news feed lets the viewer/visitor know when the writer makes a new post and offer a title or headline. The idea being if the snippet hooks your interest you are able to quickly visit the site to see to full blog post by selecting the hyperlink. The best bit for me is that the new feed display the blog posts in the order they were last posted making it even easier to view and follow others contributions.



So what are the negatives?
This is difficult to express with all the advantages given already but I guess the reverse of containing all your information in place means you might be narrowing you search for new material. The main disadvantage for me is that most MOD IT systems do not support the use of RSS feeds due to security restriction especially across limited networks.

If you are not using Google Reader I would fully recommend its use for studying with the OU.