The topic of RSS in education and learning is very much on my mind. A few findings and observations seem worth documenting, organized here loosely under the banner of communities and sharing.

Duke University is already well represented in the syndisphere, with nearly 20 RSS feeds (at least, as of today). They’re not stopping there, and we have some clues as to why. Over on FutureofPR.com, Duke associate vice president of news and communications David Jarmul recently fielded some questions about RSS. In his responses, David mentions a major RSS application Duke is planning for rollout in 2006:

We’re now building an RSS-based system and expect to roll out a central “Duke Today� site early in 2006. (Stay tuned.) In the meantime, we’re looking to other colleges and universities and, especially, to the wider online world to learn how RSS can promote community building. For instance, there’s no doubt that blogs, which are RSS-enabled, are building communities around sports, politics, culture and diverse other areas. It will be interesting to see whether we in the higher education world can use RSS similarly to nurture our own communities.

I share David’s enthusiasm for RSS’s ability to nurture communities. One way RSS is benefitting communities (beyond RSS feeds from blogs) is through various ways that RSS can be shared, and various ways that shared resources can be RSS-ified.

For example, Meredith Farkas, a Norwich University librarian and author of the blog Information Wants to be Free, makes her Bloglines RSS subscriptions public. This is Meredith sharing her world as seen through RSS. Many others, including the education blogger Will Richardson, are doing the same thing.

Mike Richwalsky and company at Allegheny College have just launched Gnosh, a search-oriented, social website that allows users to subscribe via RSS to search results run across multiple search engines. And then (as I recall speaking with Mike about this several weeks ago), RSS’d search results can be shared among registered users.

Social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us support RSS subscription to specific recently tagged items. For example, I can learn via RSS what pages people have recenly tagged with the tags “rss” and “education” via this feed. In this case, the thing being shared is not the RSS, but rather the tagged resources. RSS is a delivery mechanism for this sharing resource.

Thomson Peterson’s College and University Feed Directory will soon begin supporting OPML, offering people a way to seed their OPML-compatible RSS readers with blocks of higher ed feeds from the directory. With a few clicks, for example, readers will be able to start subscribing to all of the journal feeds in the directory using the RSS reader of their choice, and they can go about building additional subscriptions from there.

It’s good to see RSS getting some serious attention in higher ed, and that many are picking up on its ability to create and nurture community. I think we’re only at the beginning. And yet how far things have come since the early days!