I read a while ago that the University of sussex had dome somthing that looks really neat on this: http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/elearningteam/2011/08/10/recent-activity-in-moodle/
That displayed news and course updates to users. I'm not sure however if they are planning on releasing it upstream. - from comments on the post it seems that they would like to.
regards
Mark