Using Yahoo Pipes to aggregate learning resources

I am using the opportunity of me taking part in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on mobile learning as an excuse to add some more content to this neglected blog.

On of the issues I am facing with my participation in the MOOC is the massive amount of e-mails generated and my already overflowing inbox would not cope (let alone me managing it). That is not taking into account other sources such as Twitter & Flickr

Since I have always been a fan of RSS (hat tip to Dave Winer) my answer to this dilemma is to create an aggregated RSS feed from a number of sources (including the Google Group responsible for the bulk of the traffic). And so far the best tool I found for this purpose is Yahoo Pipes.

To create a Pipe log into http://pipes.yahoo.com/ (if you don’t have a YahooID you need to create one first).

The GUI is very simple (kudos Yahoo) and for simple aggregation needs hardly any explanations. The hardest part can often be finding the RSS sources to add to Pipes. The aggregation process is basically 3 steps

1. add sources (see list below)
2. add union operator
3. connect to output

As an example here are the sources used for the MobiMOOC Pipe are:

• http://groups.google.com/group/mobimooc/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml?num=100
• http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=mobimooc
• http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/geo/?tags=mobimooc&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

All you need to complete your “mobile learning journey” is to subscribe to the resulting feed (http://pipes.yahoo.com/leogaggl/mobimooc) with your favourite (mobile) RSS Reader. I personally use GoogleReader which has worked for me on various devices. It has worked well for me on Nokia S60’s, Windows Mobile, iPhone and more recently on Android.

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) by leogaggl

To download for Android you can just scan the QR Code below or just visit http://m.google.com/reader from any phone.

Since the feed sources are fairly simple I am happy for any comments on other sources to add to this feed.

Enjoy !

• Digital-Learning
• Mobimooc
• Rss
• Yahoo Pipes