RSS in Education: Show up where the students hang out.
The RSS-Specifications blog puts together a nice list of RSS resources that can be useful in the context of education. Using podcasts for lectures, sharing bookmarks with other professors, school schedules, student research are a few of the mentions. In particular, the ideas that don’t require RSS knowledge are great - Del.icio.us, Podcasts are straight forward and considered mainstream already. Now on to RSS-related hacks to make education better….
This post reminded me of something I stumbled upon a few weeks ago: Col. Mitchell Paige Middle School is a great example of a educational institution that has actually made great progress on this front. Here’s some press coverage on this. The school publishes a Principals blog, Daily Bulletin, and a Daily Podcast for parents. When I ran this by a few friends that have school age kids, every single one of them was thrilled with the idea of using push mechanisms to reach parents about important stuff and it annoyed them that their kids schools were not getting with the program. That said, all of these friends were from the SF Bay Area and worked in hi-tech so RSS is as mainstream as Email for them, and they all own iPods.
Looking at the list of ideas on the RSS-Specifications blog, this is clearly a step in the right direction and it will work for Col. Paige, a middle school in California. In general however, the execution needs to be considered carefully beyond creating RSS feeds. Most kids and Parents outside of the tech universe are not sitting in front of an RSS reader all day or even know what an RSS reader is. If its something that you need to make sure that they don’t miss or are likely to ignore, push it to a delivery mechanism of their choosing. For students, delivering this important information to “where ever it is” that they hang out is likely the best place to get their attention - Instant Messenger, Email, Facebook, Mobile Phone, etc. I’m not (yet) a parent of a school age kid but I would venture to guess that if it were made convenient for them to receive a homework assignment notification that they had to do anyway on their Facebook page, they might welcome the convenience of not having to check in somewhere else and be happy to friend you. No guarantees that it will be completed on time but you gave them a heads up. 
With the recent news of Facebook opening up its platform, I can’t wait for someone to find even more seamless ways to make this a convenience. RSS is a great transport mechanism for content but outside of tech hubs, RSS readers just don’t have the muscle to be considered a killer consumption app for most parents and kids yet. Until then, show up where the party’s at if you want to make sure that the message gets delivered.
technorati tags:RSS, RSS+education, Education, Research, Facebook, ZapTXT
Tags: RSS
