What are Syndicated Newsfeeds?
Other services can be used in a complementary manner to WebLearn. Among these are syndicated newsfeeds, which are means by which to share summaries of news, notices, notes etc that can be picked up by a great variety of Internet applications including Web sites, email clients and even mobile phone client readers. They consist essentially of a title and text body, stamped with date and time plus author and usually include an associated URL that provides the full content. Computing Services offers an service called Oxitems, available to departments, colleges, student societies and so on – the news on the main University Web site is created in Oxitems. A section in a department could create a feed for developments in online learning using WebLearn, where items are posted about changes in the VLE, complete with links to the particular resource URLs. All those involved can ‘subscribe’ to this feed using their favourite tool and soon after the feed is released they can be informed. WebLearn
