I teach at a local University, and I use a course website very aggressively – lecture video podcasts, additional materials for them to research, sample projects, everything they need is posted on the course site. I also update the course schedule, lectures I’m going to miss, changed dates for exams, etc.

The course site is using WordPress as the platform, which means feeds are generated for everything. This should make it trivial for students to stay updated with the changing content, but very few of my students understand RSS feeds. Many of them don’t even check their email, which makes RSS-to-email options untenable. They all have facebook though. Every single one of them.

I’d like to find a way to integrate an external RSS feed into the facebook notification system for students who opt-in. That way, I can update the course site, say post a lecture video, and the students who have opted-in will automatically be notified of the update, along with a link back to the original post.

It looks like the new facebook apps development platform is the best bet for getting this done. Anybody have any experience in developing for Facebook, or know of some code out there in the world that already does something like this?