16 June 2006

Wilfred Rubens: RSS, but not in education?

Reading through your Bloglines, there is always something interesting. Today this post by Wilred Rubens caught my eye (and made me think):
25 nieuwe manieren om RSS te gebruiken: "25 New Ways To Use RSS beschrijft -de naam zegt het al- vijfentwintig manieren om RSS toe te passen. Opvallend: er staan geen toepassingen voor het onderwijs tussen, zoals op de hoogte blijven van veranderingen in een onderwijsportal, leeromgeving en/of digitaal portfolio."
So, Wilfred is surprised that the article doesn't feature any educational uses of RSS. Well, I am not so surprised. For one: this article is written by a web design agency, which most possibly doesn't have any clients in the Education business. Secondly, and that is more fundamental in my opinion: we, the educational system, are really not so innovative in adopting new technology ("not invented here").
Ofcourse there are exceptions. I mean, at our University you can subscribe to 11 feeds, and also the University of Utrecht (where Wilfred is based) is offering RSS feeds as far as I know. But the creation of these feeds at our University have not happened because of some sort of university policy.
But in the end we will see things gradually changing (and because we are writing about it, we do our little push forward in the right direction). My prediction: the VLE of the not-so-distant future is called PLE, and one important glue in all this is RSS (but also iCal). Read Graham Attwell.


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