Avid Insight

The critical point made was that Moodle is geared-up to feed RSS in and out, so you can take a feed from various Moodle components, and show external feeds within your Moodle site. (You can even display a feed in Moodle from itself, which actually does have its uses).

RSS from Moodle
Apparently, many modules can offer RSS subscriptions... it's just that most people don't enable that facility in the module configuration. Forums are one of the most obvious choices... instead of getting your email inbox inundated with messages, you can just use an RSS aggregator. An interesting benefit here was highlighted, in that you might accidentally try replying to the forum post via email, whereas you can't do that with RSS.

A couple of other components which I didn't expect to be RSS-enabled are the glossary and the database. You can take a feed from these to show new entries. Most of the other standard modules with Moodle 1.8 don't offer RSS (e.g. the wiki), but 3rd-party modules often do, so it's a good thing to bear in mind!

RSS into Moodle
Going the other direction, RSS "blocks" can be added to course pages, so that a feed (or collection of feeds) can be seen by course users. This can be anything from news reports to feeds from one of the other modules (e.g. from a news forum, as we've got on the Sloodle.org frontpage!). One of the people in the room demonstrated how they have a Delicious account setup for the class, and take an RSS feed from that into their Moodle course, to encourage link sharing among class-members.

The case for including external RSS feeds in Moodle was fairly strong. Firstly that it can provide a constantly updated resource, without any extra management. And secondly, that it encourages "accidental learning", whereby a student might see an interesting link, follow it, and learn something they might not otherwise have been exposed to.