Ambient Connections via Ron Edwards

RSS, LMS, PSP?
Subscribing for Success

Blogging and Podcasting are grabbing the headlines these days and it’s encouraging that learning professionals are beginning to use them to keep themselves informed while exploring how they might support informal and formal learning in their organisations. Yet only a few people are talking about applying the power of the underlying technology which makes receiving automatic updates to blogs and podcasts possible – RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

RSS feeds can be found almost everywhere now including news sites, blogs, wikis, podcasts, online calendars (Google Calendar) photo sharing (Flickr), video sharing (You Tube), social bookmarking sites and more. This enables subscribing to content one finds of interest and aggregating these into one viewer (a feed reader) so anytime there is an update the headline becomes visible. Feed readers are web-based or installed on computers or mobiles. Many people are using the Google personalised home page to subscribe to RSS feeds and Microsoft’s Live.com page supports this as well. Subscribing to several feeds gives one a sense of being “on top of it” as always the most recent postings are visible. The latest Podcast available is listed as a headline which provides a choice of when to listen or if to download, saving storage and time.

Extending RSS into Your Enterprise
Subscribing to feeds to stay informed of industry and professional news is just one of many applications. Projects can also be tracked with a feed reader enabling viewing updates from team wikis, calendars and blogs in real time and these can be combined with other news so everything of interest and importance is combined onto one page, creating a high performance personal portal for free. Studies show how using collaborative wikis shorten production time to help teams reach consensus while reducing email inefficiency on everything from policies, procedures, presentations to new product ideas so why not propose their use for projects within your organisation? Team members would benefit from more efficient practices over email updates and employees could be kept in the loop of proposed changes or just when the new information is available. Finding project applications where staying informed through the use of RSS would build acceptance in the value of subscribing to feeds. This in turn helps open the door for using them in learning and development programmes.

RSS & Learning
RSS is helpful to learning managers in a variety of ways as well. Keeping colleagues informed of new programmes via RSS feeds instead of relying on a website not enough people visit, or surfing through an LMS which may not highlight what’s new, or relying on often ignored email is an automated way to ensure the latest developments are always at the forefront. If your organisation is one of the few that already has an internal feed reader established, you should ask your IT department how to enable RSS feeds on your departmental portal. If your primary tool for communicating learning programmes is the LMS, you should enquire as to how (and when!) their platform will support RSS.

Blended learning programmes which happen over time are another good place to look for opportunities to improve information flow by using RSS. Many leadership development programmes utilise posting comments and reflections in online communities or blogs. Course facilitators would benefit from having an RSS feed of these aggregated in one place so as to always be up to date with postings, especially when working with several groups simultaneously. Learners would benefit as well by knowing when each other had commented or when the facilitator had news for the group. Keeping the group constantly and automatically informed may help delegates stay focused and keep up with the learning process. Information from a variety of sources are often used in blended learning programmes so using RSS to subscribe to certain sites to guide learning and discussion could often be more efficient and may introduce people to using RSS feeds that could have a follow on benefit.

RSS Goes Mobile
People are increasingly mobile and it’s no surprise that we want to stay informed on the move as well. News feeds on PDAs have been around for years through free tools such as AvantGo, which now enables subscribing to RSS feeds in addition to their news, entertainment and education resources and is also available on BlackBerrys. Smart Phones which support Internet access enable use of the same Google or Microsoft home pages used on the desktop to subscribe to feeds and many have RSS readers already built in (or can be downloaded). The Sony PSP game and entertainment device also supports RSS to enable subscribing to video podcasts or viewing and contributing to blogs. It’s clear that up to the minute content is now available on a wide range of mobile devices.

Subscribing to RSS feeds and making it easy for others to subscribe to key information which constantly changes is growing in both interest and application. Aggregating information using RSS helps us stay informed, engaged and learning!

About the Author
Ron Edwards is the Managing Director of Ambient Performance, Ltd., a UK based firm specializing in helping organisations apply mobile, Web 2.0 and Virtual World technologies for better performance. You can subscribe to Ron’s blog at www.ambientperformance.com/connection