Thomas' Work Space

1. Why to subscribe?
   1. RSS is a great way to get your information both fast and filtered.
   2. For advanced filtering of RSS feeds, try Yahoo Pipes.
   3. However, WordPress makes this even easier by allowing for a wealth of atomic searching and filtering options. Choosing the right template (and content strategy), if you click on any of the linked items in either the category list or tag cloud on WordPress,
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   5. the resulting page will include an RSS link , or simply add “/feed” to the URL of your category, tag or even search result page, to get a feed  that you can subscribe to.
2. How to subscribe?
1. MS-Outlook makes subscribing to RSS more convenient since you do not need to go to a separate application like an RSS-Reader. Read your RSS with your email, think of the RSS feed as an email list, but personalized to your interests.
   1. You can subscribe to the “RSS feed” link like so:
   2. For historical reasons, I still use Google Reader, but I rely on Outlook’s advanced automated content download (including full text posts and multimedia attachments) and well-understood archiving, search and export features to not miss podcasts which I want to collect for potential use as teaching content: When Outlook fails, as with some RSS formats, you can still try and resort to the Internet Explorer Feed store:
2. If you use OWA: you can read feeds, but not add them through the OWA interface. If you are staff, you can still add them in Outlook first. If you are a student and restricted to NINERMAIL, you need to use a different feed reader. I recommend the free web-based Google Reader.

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2. From which follows: tightly manage your metadata…..

1. Go to Top menu: Extensions / menu item: module manager / upper right corner button: new / radio button: feed display / upper right button: next
2. Fill out this form, some hints to follow: 
1. radio button: show title: module name will be displayed on front page,
2. Position
3. Order
4. RTL = Right To Left
5. title: can give context
6. image: not if you want a tight display
7. items: more than 3
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4. The resulting feed display looks like this on the Joomla Front Page: 
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1. Running a blog? Feeding a twitter account? It could be worthwhile narrowcasting your (teaching-related) postings (presumably more substantial than tweets about tardiness for class) by integrating it with your Moodle course, via RSS.
2. As of today, UNCC-Moodle offers new layout options, including putting blocks into the content (center) column, as a “sticky” post underneath the header.
3. This is timely, since I have created a Moodle site for the LRC staff and have been wondering how I can use it to quickly update the LRC staff on new technological opportunities or issues and solutions around the LRC.
4. Moodle’s RSS block  – linking to the feeds that my blog feed/Twitter hash tag for LRC staff emit – makes that easy.
5. Except that up until now, outside the center column, there has not been enough space to display also the teaser of blog posts – an area I invest some thought in, in accordance with age old publishing principles transferred into the internet age.
6. The layout options upgrade allows me to fix that – here is how:
7. After pressing button: editing on, choose from the dropdown “blocks”: remote RSS feeds

Adjust the settings: for me it is important to display descriptions.

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10. Don’t be confused by the inability to add your feed source – you need to change to the tab: “manage my feeds” first:
11. if you make your feed a “share feed”, it becomes an option for all institutional Moodle sites. 
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13. Validate your feed so that Moodle doe not outright refuse to display  (the linked validator will give you error information that can help you fix your feed).
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15. After moving your feed to the center with the “left arrow”, you can
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17. You can see more of the Moodle RSS block results here.

We have added newsfeeds to the most recent LRC news for students and teachers to the UNCC-LRC homepage, in the hope that our clients will find it easier to learn about new LRC features for language learning.

1. Searching
   1. Full-text search: quick, even though dumb (“Computers are only machines…”). It may not return the most relevant results.
   2. Human-curated search: The author adds metadata to his posts as he sees fit. The metadata vocabulary is somewhat stable from past experience, but may change (”The author is only a human.”  ). You effectively execute a humanly-curated search when clicking in the right column on either
      1. a tag link, e.g.  http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/
      2. a category link, e.g.
   3. Humanly-curated and Boolean AND search combined: This can be powerful in drilling down to an answer to a specific problem – provided there is one on the blog.
      1. Even though there is no easily clickable interface for this, by building URLs in the web browser address bar , combining tags or categories with the plus-sign, you can execute an AND-search against multiple tags(or categories) on WordPress.com
      2. Example: http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/ finds posts that the author related to both Moodle and eRepository. This can be especially useful for searching the FAQs: http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/faq+[add your problem-technology-tag here, e.g. Audacity]/
2. Notifications: Subscribe to RSS-feeds to receive timely updates on the topics that matter most to you.  Both
   1. WordPress.com, providing RSS-feeds for all categories and tags (click on a tag or category link and find the icon, it will link to the RSS feed – Example: http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/feed/) – watch either the webpage or your browser GUI for orange RSS icons you can click on to initiate a subscription  -and also for multiple categories/tags (even though this feature is even better hidden, you need to construct a URL in your browser address bar. Example: http://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/feed/). If you want to go beyond our own metadata, WordPress allows also for subscribing to your own searches via RSS: “To keep up with your favorite search results we offer an RSS feed for all search results. Simply click the Follow this search via RSS link in the side bar of any search results page to subscribe to updates in the search result”, consult the WordPress search documentation.
   2. and MS-Outlook, making RSS-subscriptions look familiar like email (of importance in certain environments), greatly facilitate this.
3. Text-messaging: Get synchronous human help through the Moodle-Wimba Room link.