This page is for questions that have been posed to me about presentations,
either after the session, or via email.
Question: What levels have you tried RSS feeds with?
Answer: My courses are mostly juniors, seniors, and graduate
students, so I have not tried the learning community with RSS feeds on
underclassmen. I have found, however, that the lower the level, the more
reluctant they are to begin participation. Once they begin, however, it
seems that all levels participate about equally. You might not want to
start your community to be as complicated as mine. Certainly, this is a
technology that lends itself to easy configuration for your setting.
Question: What if I can't set up my own blogs and wikis
because we are not allowed to install such things on our system?
Answer: Start them out as a community by introducing them to
the aggregators (readers) and give them a list of sites to subscribe to.
If they have their own blogs and they want people to have access to them, they
can share those addresses so others can subscribe. Everyone can download
and use an RSS reader. Secondly, setting up a feed does not require that
you set up your own server software, but it does require that your students
have access to web space where they can upload their feeds (xml files).
If this is a limitation on your campus, you might try "renting" some web space
from a commercial provider and setting up an area for your students to upload
files. This can be done fairly inexpensively (less than $10 per month).
Question: What if all our software is behind a firewall and
can't be made Internet-accessible?
Answer: You have three choices here: You can run your
community on your intranet (that which is behind your firewall) and make them
access it from on-campus (i.e. inside the firewall) locations. Second,
you could find blog and wiki sites that are open to the public and set
something up there. Third, you could use a combination of these two
techniques. Again, this is so configurable that should always be some
option you can use.
Question: Can I try out FeedForAll without buying it?
Answer: Yes, it has a 30-day trial. You can download it
and try it for 30 days, so that might allow you to try out a collaboration
without having to worry about licensing, so long as your project is
short-term.
Question: How do I get ahold of a freeware or open source
feed generator?
Answer:
ListGarden is a package that gets decent reviews, but I have not
personally used it.
