EDUCAUSE REVIEW | March/April 2006, Volume 41, Number 2 (p)(f)
Popularity Report
 |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
Rank
URL Tag Cloud
Groups (1)
Bookmark History
Saved by 22 people (3 private), first by anonymouse user on 2006-08-04
- Scadwell on 2008-03-20 - Tags web2.0
- Csloan on 2008-02-06 - Tags de.licio.us , educause , pedagogy , social_software , tags , teaching , web2.0
- Lian11 on 2008-01-09 - Tags educause , etec.540 , resources , social_software , technology , tools , web2.0
- Sheryl_barnes on 2007-11-05 - Tags educational_technology , web2.0
- Tstahmer on 2007-10-28 - Tags article , blogging , collaboration , education , educause , socialsoftware
Public Sticky notes
A political science class could explore different views of a news story through traditional media using Google News, then from the world of blogs via Memeorandum. A history class could use Blogdex in an exercise in thinking about worldviews. There are also possibilities for a campus information environment. What would a student newspaper look like, for example, with a section based on the Digg approach or the OhmyNews structure? Thematizing these tools as objects for academic scrutiny, the operation and success of such projects is worthy of study in numerous disciplines, from communication to media studies, sociology to computer science.
Highlighted by sheryl_barnes
insights into the owner�s (or owners�) research, which could play well in a classroom setting as an instructor tracks students� progress. Students, in turn, can learn from their professor�s discoveries.
Highlighted by sheryl_barnes
user-created tagging
Highlighted by sheryl_barnes
learning from others or by leading to new collaborations
Highlighted by sheryl_barnes
Web 2.0 services respond more deeply to users than Web 1.0 services
Highlighted by sheryl_barnes
affordance of collaborative information discovery
Highlighted by sheryl_barnes
multi-authored bookmark pages
Highlighted by sheryl_barnes
Ultimately, the label �Web 2.0� is far less important than the concepts, projects, and practices included in its scope.
Highlighted by lindseybp
Social software has emerged as a major component of the Web 2.0 movement.
Highlighted by lindseybp
ocial software does not indicate a sharp break with the old but, rather, the gradual emergence of a new type of practice.
Highlighted by lindseybp
they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of conversation, revision, amendment, and truncation. Podcasts are shuttled between Web sites, RSS feeds, and diverse players. These content blocks can be saved, summarized, addressed, copied, quoted, and built into new projects.
Highlighted by lindseybp
This openness is crucial to current Web 2.0 discussions.
Highlighted by lindseybp
Yet openness remains a hallmark of this emergent movement, both ideologically and technologically.
Highlighted by lindseybp
A leading form of this is a controversial new form of metadata, the folksonomy.
Highlighted by lindseybp
olksonomic metadata consists of words that users generate and attach to content.
Highlighted by lindseybp
eb 2.0 services tend to provide tools for helping users with their folksonomies. Tags can be arranged into concept maps called �tag clouds,� which allow revisualization of the way one considers one�s work.5 The social bookmarking innovator del.icio.us automatically reminds users of previously deployed tags, suggests some tags, and notes tags used by others. Third, people tend to tag socially. That is, they learn from other taggers and respond to other, published groups of tags, or �tagsets.�6
Highlighted by lindseybp
Taken together, this set of concepts informs a way of making, sharing, and consuming digital documents—a way that differs from what we have grown accustomed to. I
Highlighted by lindseybp
groups can create del.icio.us accounts.
Highlighted by lindseybp
any user can create an in-box for what someone else is bookmarking, by subscribing to the other person�s del.icio.us pages. Users can also subscribe to tags and receive a list of URLs tagged with a certain word on their del.icio.us page. Each annotated tag is dated, editable, and organized in reverse chronological order,
Highlighted by lindseybp
Visitors to the del.icio.us site can examine which tags are the most prominent at a given time throughout the entire set of all del.icio.us pages, can search for sites by tags (what is tagged �Napoleon�?), or can look to see what tags users have attached to the same site. Having found another del.icio.us user, one can check what else the other user has chosen to bookmark and share, thereby learning from a potentially kindred spirit.8
Highlighted by lindseybp
How can social bookmarking play a role in higher education? Pedagogical applications stem from their affordance of collaborative information discovery. For instance, researchers at all levels (students, faculty, staff) can quickly set up a social bookmarking page for their personal and/or professional inquiries. The Penntags project at the University of Pennsylvania (http://tags.library.upenn.edu/) and Harvard�s H2O (http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/home.do) are examples. First, they act as an �outboard memory,� a location to store links that might be lost to time, scattered across different browser bookmark settings, or distributed in e-mails, printouts, and Web links. Second, finding people with related interests can magnify one�s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations. Third, the practice of user-created tagging can offer new perspectives on one�s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible by examining one of several URLs. Fourth, the ability to create multi-authored bookmark pages can be useful for team projects, as each member can upload resources discovered, no matter their location or timing. Tagging can then surface individual perspectives within the collective. Fifth, following a bookmark site gives insights into the owner�s (or owners�) research, which could play well in a classroom setting as an instructor tracks students� progress. Students, in turn, can learn from their professor�s discoveries.
Highlighted by lindseybp
How do social writing platforms intersect with the world of higher education? They appear to be logistically useful tools for a variety of campus needs, from student group learning to faculty department work to staff collaborations. Pedagogically, one can imagine writing exercises based on these tools, building on the established body of collaborative composition practice. These services offer an alternative platform for peer editing, supporting the now-traditional elements of computer-mediated writing—asynchronous writing, groupwork for distributed members, and so on
Highlighted by lindseybp
Readers can push back on a blog post by commenting on it. These comments are then addressable, forming new microcontent. Web services have grown up around blog comments, most recently in the form of aggregation tools,
Highlighted by lindseybp
A second explanation for the popularity of blogs is the rise in Google searches of blog posts, based in part on the tendency of bloggers to link extensively and Google's use of links to rank results.
Highlighted by lindseybp
Feedster (http://feedster.com/) and Daypop (http://www.daypop.com/) let users search for content within blogs alone.
Highlighted by lindseybp
Technorati is perhaps the most famous blog-search tool. Among other functions, it has emphasized tagging as part of search and discovery, recommending (and rewarding) users who add tags to their blog posts. Bloggers can register their site for free with Technorati; their posts will then be searchable by content and supplemental tags.
Highlighted by lindseybp
Many of these services allow users to save their searches as RSS feeds to be returned to and examined in an RSS reader, such as Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) or NetNewsWire (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/). This subtle ability is neatly recursive in Web 2.0 terms, since it lets users create microcontent (RSS search terms) about microcontent (blog posts). Being merely text strings, such search feeds are shareable in all sorts of ways, so one can imagine collaborative research projects based on growing swarms of these feeds—social bookmarking plus social search.
Highlighted by lindseybp
Students can search the blogosphere for political commentary, current cultural items, public developments in science, business news, and so on.
Highlighted by lindseybp
The ability to save and share a search, and in the case of PubSub, to literally search the future, lets students and faculty follow a search over time, perhaps across a span of weeks in a semester. As the live content changes, tools like Waypath�s topic stream, BlogPulse�s trend visualizations, or DayPop�s word generator let a student analyze how a story, topic, idea, or discussion changes over time. Furthermore, the social nature of these tools means that collaboration between classes, departments, campuses, or regions is easily supported. One could imagine faculty and students across the United States following, for example, the career of an Islamic feminist or the outcome of a genomic patent and discussing the issue through these and other Web 2.0 tools. Such a collaboration could, in turn, be discovered, followed, and perhaps joined by students and faculty around the world. Extending the image, one can imagine such a social research object becoming a learning object or an alternative to courseware.
Highlighted by lindseybp
A closer look at an individual Blogdex result reveals the blogs that link to a story. As we saw with del.icio.us, this publication of interest allows the user to follow up on commentary, to see why those links are there, and to learn about those doing the linking. Once again, this is a service that connects people through shared interest in information.
Highlighted by lindseybp
Like Blogdex and Zeitgeist, Memeorandum—through the topics presented—offers a glimpse into the collective mind of many, many people at a given moment.
Highlighted by lindseybp
Digg, devoted primarily to technology topics, accepts submissions of stories that users consider worthy of public attention. Users can then vote for, or �digg,� stories they like, and the site promotes the results accordingly.
Highlighted by lindseybp
The rich search possibilities opened up by these tools can further enhance the pedagogy of current events. A political science class could explore different views of a news story through traditional media using Google News, then from the world of blogs via Memeorandum. A history class could use Blogdex in an exercise in thinking about worldviews.
Highlighted by lindseybp
Web 2.0 meta-services, like social software before them, are heading for the mobile, wireless world.
Highlighted by lindseybp
How will colleges and universities consider preserving such small pieces of intellectual work, especially as the works migrate across multiple, shifting, changing platforms?
Highlighted by lindseybp
copyright.
Highlighted by lindseybp
It is much simpler to set up a del.icio.us tag for a topic one wants to pursue or to spin off a blog or blog departmental topic than it is to physically meet co-learners and experts in a classroom or even to track down a professor. Starting a wiki-level text entry is far easier than beginning an article or book. What new, natively digital textual forms are impending as small-scale production scales up? �Web 1.0� has already demonstrated immense powers for connecting learners, teachers, and materials. How much more broadly will this connective matrix grow under the impact of the openness, ease of entry, and social nature of Web 2.0?20 How can higher education respond, when it offers a complex, contradictory mix of openness and restriction, public engagement and cloistering? How do we respond to the possibilities of what some call �E-learning 2.0,� based on environments, microcontent, and networking?21
Highlighted by lindseybp
Public Comment
on 2006-08-25 by fuzzyface