Using yahoo pipes in an educational context
The use of rss aggregation to pull things together for an individual and personal view is becoming more common. However, this has resulted in potential confusion due to people having to subscribe to a number of RSS feeds. This can get a little unwieldy on a handheld device. However, for the mobile learner the following scenario is very appealing,
scenario 1: keeping informed about what colleagues are reading and thinking about w.r.t a topic. This has a very ready connection to collaborative group work.
Student Sue is working in a group with 4 other students for an assignment. This group need to share ther bookmarks (mostly stored in delicious), share their thoughts about the literature, these are personal reviews and they are planning on storing these on their personal blogs, and they need to regularly update on progress with the group work. Again a regular update will be written by people on their blogs, although they will also use SMS via twitter to help foster the social network.
It just happens that Student Sue uses her mobile device for most of her work, so she needs a means of drawing this altogether.
The solution is to use the RSS feeds from all these different software tools and the RSS aggregator on her mobile device. The issues is that if there are 3 other people, using 3 different solutions each, then this is a large number of RSS feeds to keep track on. So it might be easier to use a tool to combine these different feeds into just one feed. The answer is Yahoo Pipes :-)
Please note, if you want a tutorial on using Yahoo Pipes then I'd suggest a quick Google search.
Another advantage of using Yahoo Pipes compared to lots of individual feeds is that you can quickly set user controls over the RSS feeds you are combining. For instance, you can set the number of entries from each feed, filter the feed by key terms that you determine, you can sort the combined feeds into the desired order. Then you publish the pipe (combined rss feeds) into another new rss feed which you subscribe to on your handheld device.
The following illustrates just how simple and elegant a solution this is. As a group (the elearning team at the University of Bath) we want to share amongst other things our readings and thoughts about the educational potential of twitter. We have a dispersed, individualised approach of using social bookmarking software (most delicious), and personal reflective blogs. So we want to harness our current working practice.
We have set up a few ground rules to work out how we might achieve sharing information (bookmarks, thoughts about articles, and our own observations about using the tool), and this has involved creating a very simple tag convention. We then undertake some awareness training, upload to the supporting wiki pages our rss feeds from individual blogs. And finally the RSS feed from the yahoo pipes. As more rss feeds are created around the topic then we simply add these to the pipe in yahoo pipes and re-run. In terms of impact, that is starting to be observed.
Finally you ask, what does it look like? Well, all very nice ...