RSS and journals

When setting up our smallworlds project and the course content for key skills undergraduate course, we struggled to find good sources of customisable RSS searches in peer reviewed journals. In the course of searching for something else, I stumbled across a solution today, the JISC project ticTOC.

ticTOC

ticTOC allows you to search for journals by journal name or publisher, then add them to a list ‘myTOC’.

The table of contents for these journals can then be exported as a OPML file for an RSS reader. Very simple and easy to do.

TOCs RSS in Google Reader

I would like to be able to take this one stage further and add search terms but, it is a step in the right direction.

Of course, I put it on twitter and then got another suggestion for something similar (thanks twitterverse!), myjournals. Tools like these are the workhorses that we need to encourage more scientists into the web2.0 world. Current awareness is the bread and butter of science, if we can make it obvious that RSS can turn your bread and butter into a cheese toasty we are laughing!

update: general Search added December 2008.

The joys of teaching students about RSS

google reader

As part of our HEA Centre for Bioscience departmental project, we are introducing a web 2.0 theme to the first year IT and numeracy skills module. I fully subscribe to the aims of this project : that we should be providing a first class experience of education and that does not include teaching them how to use Microsoft word but should include information handling skills, like using RSS.

So, after complaining that email was too easy, and bibliographic databases were too hard, we embarked today on RSS. Alan Cann bravely wrote some online notes, and today the students started signing up for Google reader. It was clear from the start that there were some problems:

1. Asking them to sign up to peer reviewed journal feeds: students were unaware of what a peer reviewed journal was and it is fairly early in their career to be considering this. Finding reliable sources of feeds for journals is a nightmare – why can’t publishers get their act together?! Zetoc at least has some Table of Content feeds. Thank goodness for the british library
2. Assessing this exercise: unless anyone as any bright ideas (and please please day you have) giving weekly feedback on this is not easy (for 200 students). The options we have are commenting in the blackboard gradebook (not simple) or emailing individual students.
3. Integration with our other courses: I think we need a concerted effort to encourage other convenors to encourage the use of web 2 technologies by bringing tagging and RSS into other modules, or by adding relevant RSS feeds to their own Blackboard sites. We will probably need to work on this over the next academic year during the process of introducing staff to RSS themselves…

A steep learning curve for this year, but I still think it is worth the effort!