One of the most common requests that I can think of from newcomers to the “loosely coupled teaching” approach is:
“How do I roll together a number of feeds and produce a single RSS feed for them.”
Over the years I’ve recommended any number of approaches, from Yahoo Pipes to Grazr. But in trying to share a bunch of feeds with a colleague today, I stumbled on a feature of Google Reader I hadn’t used before that makes this dead easy. Named “Bundles,” these are essentially a simple way to publish a web page that represents a folder of RSS feeds from your reader. To make a bundle, simply click on a folder in Google Reader
Then Save it…
And voila, what results is a public HTML page aggregating the feed, with a subscribe button, as well as a link to the ATOM feed and OPML file.
I’m not suggesting everyone has to drop their current approaches and flock to GReader, just that this is yet another simple technique to add to the basket that makes combining, remixing and repurposing content that flows via RSS just that much easier. And that has to be a good thing. – SWL
Thanks Scott, great feature to learn about. I like the functionality of the bundle clip too; makes for a useful WordPress widget!
Very cool. We get the same request all the time, did not know about this feature very useful.
Thanks for posting.
Thanks Scott! I’m going to try this today and it’s going to be rad!
Thanks Scott, while you’re right there are several ways to accomplish this, I can better imagine explaining this to teachers as a way to collect student blog posts.
Glad it seems helpful. The other piece I was trying to think of yesterday when I wrote this, but got distracted (oh, look, shiny!) was a simple way for students to submit their feed URLs that either added them directly to a Google Reader folder, or more likely, to an OPML file that could easily be imported to create a folder. At that point you have a pretty simply self-serve eduglu-type workflow. Such a thing would be trivial to build as a script, but I’m sure someone’s done it – any ideas? (Less trivial would be the “Add to Google Reader folder script, but I stumbled across the “unofficial google reader api” the other day, so maybe not impossible…)
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