I twice read the USA Today piece on RSS and “college students’ diet for research,” thinking all the while that something was missing. Tonight, I realized what’s missing: the unsung role that universities are playing in introducing students to RSS through campus portals.

I don’t have any empirical evidence, but judging from some conversations I had with attendees at a recent conference in Salisbury, the idea of student portals incorporating RSS seems to be catching on.

According to Jill Brinton at the University of Utah, Utah’s experiment with RSS (which now involves extensive public feeds) began with the student portal, where they offered students the ability to incorporate RSS feeds from both on-campus and off-campus sources, such as local newspapers.

Penn State also appears to have a portal involving RSS feeds, complete with instructions for content providers about contributing RSS feeds to this resource.

The University of Alabama is another offering a student portal incorporating RSS feeds.

Does your college portal incorporate RSS feeds? If so, I’d like to hear about it. What kinds of feeds are available through the portal?