simple syndication
My students in the “New Communication Technologies” class I’m TAing this semester are taking their last exam tomorrow. Yesterday, I conducted a review session while the professor was presenting at an open source workshop. A few weeks ago, I had given lectures on social software and open source modes of production. RSS was on the review sheet, so of course one of the questions yesterday was “What’s RSS?” Geeky readers may be snickering at this point, but explaining RSS to undergraduate film majors is surprisingly hard. When I explained it as a way to track blogs to see when they’re updated, students ask, “Is that like when Facebook emails me to tell me when someone’s left a comment on my page?” No, it isn’t.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they ask this when I can’t expect them to know the differences in the underlying technology. Their eyes glaze over when I use phrases like “machine-readable metadata format.” Students seem to get the concept of metadata when I explain that IDv3 tags are a metadata format for describing the content of mp3 files, but they don’t really seem to get that RSS is a way to describe the content of a blog. During research presentations last week, a student said that Brightcove will have RSS feeds, “so it will be really easy for bloggers to put video on their site.” I think one problem I have with explaining RSS to these students is that I give the RSS feed too much agency. It isn’t the RSS feed that tells you that a blog has been updated. The RSS reader tells you a blog has been updated after it checks the RSS feed. I guess I don’t even make this distinction in my own mind.
Have your students ever looked at raw HTML or RSS code? I think it should be a lot easier to explain by walking through some of the key elements.
We took a look at an RSS file during my initial lecture on “social software,” but I think it just looked like a bunch of jibberish to them, even as I was pointing the different parts. Part of the problem is the scope of the course. We’re covering nearly every communication technology introduced since the 1960s, covering topics from cable TV, satellite technology, changes in FCC spectrum allocation policy to blogs, wiki, and Linux. If it was an internet class, we could dig into code more, but it’s mostly about introducing topics they might encounter in the real-world and giving them the most lightweight understanding.