RSS Applications: What's going on at OU?

[Laura Gibbs]

One of the tools I promote with my students is Bloglines, a fantastic RSS reader and simple blogging tool. I'm always looking for good OU-related RSS feeds that I can share with them - but aside from the RSS feed for the OUDaily, SoonerSports.com RSS, and David Corbly's fabulous RSS feeds for the OU Libraries, I'm hardpressed to find other good feeds for them to subscribe to that are OU-related. Oh yeah, you can get Pick-A-Prof's OU feed... but surely there must be other RSS feeds out there - please let me know if you have any RSS feeds for your OU group or organization which I can put on the list of suggestions for my students!

We could even use YahooPipes to create a giant combined OU feed! :-)

[Scott Watkins]

At the College of Education, we have a few feeds that we administer.

One is called 'Voices- Audio Presentations from the College of Education', which is a collection of lectures, presentations, etc. that have been initiated by the College or faculty/staff within the College.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/oucoevoices

The other two are more or less targeted at our students, faculty/staff, and friends of the College. The first is our Announcements and Events feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/coeannouncements, the other is our Student Services Podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/StudentServicesPodcast

[Kerry Magruder]

We have a feed for images recently digitized in the History of Science Collections.
http://hsci.cas.ou.edu/images/blogs/dc/site/Images/rss.xml

Here's the blog:
http://hsci.ou.edu/images/blogs/dc/site/Images/Images.html

Unfortunately, I haven't updated it this semester, given the chaos of moving the Collections. But it will go live again before the end of the summer, with lots of interesting new works being digitized.

[Laura Gibbs]

Thanks to Scott and Kerry! The number of OU feeds that I can suggest to students has now doubled! Yeah!!!

I see you are using Feedburner, Scott - isn't it awesome? I love the Feedburner email subscription service. About half of my students sign up to get the announcements by email with the Feedburner email service. That's perfect: the students who want email can get it, but the students who are "beyond email" can subscribe to the blog directly or view the announcements in Desire2Learn, instead of getting needless email. They CHOOSE. It's web2.0 at its best! :-)

[Laura Gibbs]

I did a quick check of the three websites that Melanee had mentioned in relation to the Day CMS - University College, Journalism, Graduation - and at first glance I didn't discover any RSS feeds. Since that is definitely my own personal interest (I'm always on the prowl for OU RSS feeds to share with my students!), I'd be really curious what RSS capability the Day CMS offers! For me, if there is no RSS, the website might as well not exist... because if I come there once, how will I ever know to come back again...??? Even if all you use RSS for is to let people know when there is something new added to the website, that's a huge plus.

I did a quick check through the colleges and found news feeds for Meteorology: YEAH!!! I've added that to my list! It's prominently featured on the A&GS college home page: is that your website, Alicia? I think it's super that you feature the RSS feed so clearly - it caught my attention right away: http://ags.ou.edu/

So far College of Ed. is the only college that has had a feed that was automatically discovered by Firefox on loading the college homepage: WAY TO GO, SCOTT!!!

[Scott Watkins]

Thank you, it's just a matter of adding a link tag in the head of the document:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Feed" href="http://ou.edu/your_feed.xml" />

[Laura Gibbs]

You've inspired me: I'm going to add this tag to the homepage for my courses; that way students will be able to subscribe to the RSS feed for the announcements the same way I encourage them to subscribe to feeds at other sites, just clicking on the RSS icon that pops up in the browser address bar. Blogger.com does that automatically for blogs, PBWiki does it automatically for wikis... and if it's that easy, I'll do it for my websites also. Thanks!!! :-)

[Laura Gibbs]

It worked: whoo-hoo! I feel very sophisticated! Now I have autofeed discovery...! :-)