The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom

Although in the past fews years there has been a marked growth in the number of higher education classrooms that utilize an on-line writing component, adapting the teaching of writing to digital spaces has met with resistance on the part of both students and professors. While there are many hurdles to address in navigating technological changes in writing practices, I would like to suggest that part of the problem has been a lack of understanding about the ways that information is disseminated and archived in these spaces. We need to begin by framing the approach in a new way to contextualize writing better, and, more importantly, to make classroom blogging (and even more broadly writing in digital spaces) more productive for the students and professors. In particular, I want to show how the technology of RSS is crucial both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint to any digital writing, but especially to any blogging classroom.

When asked, those who work in information technology (I speak here not of those in the academy but rather those who work at technology industries) about the most significant transformations in communication in the past ten years, one of the most often cited developments is RSS. However, a large majority of internet users, by some estimations over 90%, have no idea about this technology, or how it is changing information dissemination on the internet. (I have found that among students, even though this is the tech-savvy generation, less that one in ten have used RSS. If you are one of those not familiar with RSS please indulge me for a short moment and I promise to explain.) Although in the past several years RSS use has expanded to include content from almost any type of website, its initial growth in usage can be traced to blogs (weblogs). And although RSS has so many uses beyond blogs, RSS can greatly enhance classroom blogging both in the pedagogical and the practical realms.

For those who are not familiar with RSS, allow me a brief explanation. Although there are more in depth resources available to explain RSS (see references at the end of this article), I am going to offer a short explanation to aim at the concept behind what RSS does. When I am asked by people, regardless of their level of network literacy, what RSS is, I try to explain it by analogy to a newspaper. Imagine that you could have a newspaper delivered to your house that had only the content you wanted. That is, let's say you want the sports section from Chicago Tribune, the education section from the New York Times, the editorial page from the Guardian, and international headline news from the BBC. Now lets say this newspaper would be compiled for you and presented to you whenever you requested, and, what is more, would only give you the information that has changed since last you asked. But, even better what if you could also add into this “newspaper” your best friend's blog on cooking, a travel blog from Asia, updates from the Chronicle of Higher Ed . . .or pretty much any website you want. This allows you to monitor all of the content that you select from the web without having to visit all of the sites. What RSS does is “syndicate” all of the content you want, and send you everything you have asked for. (RSS stands for either “Rich Site Summary,“ or ”Really Simple Syndication.“) Any site you have seen with the following Feed Icon XML Icon RSS Icon is offering these summaries, or syndication; all you have to do is subscribe. I am not going to go into the details of how you get the subscriptions, or what programs you need to do this (you can even do this all on-line so you do not need a separate program), but you can check the end of this article for a few resources that will help you set up the syndication. There are a lot of resources out there to handle these feeds, and each has advantages and disadvantages, so it is worth some time and effort to try out many of these to find out which works for your particular educational situation.
Abstract

Although in the past fews years there has been a marked growth in the number of higher education classrooms that utilize an on-line writing component, adapting the teaching of writing to digital spaces has met with resistance on the part of both students and professors. While there are many hurdles to address in navigating technological changes in writing practices, I would like to suggest that part of the problem has been a lack of understanding about the ways that information is disseminated and archived in these spaces. We need to begin by framing the approach in a new way to contextualize writing better, and, more importantly, to make classroom blogging (and even more broadly writing in digital spaces) more productive for the students and professors. In particular, I want to NBA jerseys show how the technology of RSS is crucial both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint to any digital writing, but especially to any blogging classroom.