The new resource: social bookmarks, tagging or something else?
Got an email from Matthew Kearney at UTS asking about what to do and where to go with those enormous and valuable projects we all went nuts over many years ago, namely the ‘resource / links sits’.
In particular Matthew points to some resources he put together a while back (edtech, science) for kids and prospective K12 teachers and shares frustrations which many of us, I’m sure, will share:
“As you can see, it soon got out of hand with a) maintenance b) user-friendliness (became simply another ‘long list of 1000’s of resources) and c) broken links..”
Which brings me to write (with Matthews permission) this post.
For me these are really valuable sites… there’s a lot of selection, expertise and opportunity for people to browse off from these and as much as I like my ‘up to the minute’ tagged, blogged or social links… this is where I’d point people / turn to in looking for significant links.
But, of course, it isn’t sustainable (unless you’ve got many hours to put this together) and is really, the reflection of only one persons perspective.
Matthew’s after something which is:
a) more student-driven & collaborative i.e.. by our prospective student teachers
b) easy to search and find useful resources and
c) (somehow?) free from ‘link-rot’ …
I’d probably add ‘currently relevant’ to the pile (another of the problems that these sites have encountered is a tendency to point to years old materials… particularly out-of-date considering the pace of change at the moment).
One of the possible solutions he’s thinking about is Scuttle, obviously there’s wiki potential here (but that doesn’t help currently relevant or link-rot issues) and something tells me that there needs to be a rating / review system here (a bit like an Amazon.com of links).
Another question is whether this could / should be a broader project than UTS… or whether you would want it to be?
Any ideas, I think this is something that most ed designers will come across at one point and it’d be good to have system in mind… even if it’s yet to be developed!
July 20th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
Hey, lets use blogs!
July 20th, 2005 at 2:57 pm
very amusing
July 20th, 2005 at 3:48 pm
Thanks for raising this issue James…
another concern is the issue of tags - if we go down the ‘delicious’ road for example, i’d imagine that we will make suggested ‘tags’ for our prospective teachers to use (eg. k-6, science, chemistry, demo etc.) but these tags also carry ‘assumptions’ that may not make sense to everyone
a 2nd issue is sustainability - we don’t want to start over in 2 years time if delcious go out of business … do social bookmariking tools like delicious allow you to ‘back up’ your bookmarks?
I do feel the whole process is worthwhile though as prospective teachers tend to have a little more time than practising teachers to find ‘e-learning gems’ & the ability to share these with their peers (& other educators) could be useful & at tyhe same time encourages them to build up their own professional libraries of teaching resources …
cheers
Matthew
July 20th, 2005 at 11:08 pm
I’d be interested in hearing how folksonomy is like wikis. In particular, it sounds like wikis implies bad. Do you elaborate on that somewhere? I have to say my experience with wikis is not all that positive (over nullifying to the individual), so I may be engaging in projection.
In some of this discussion, I have trouble distinguishing between tagging and link blogging. If you look at most tagging tools, they are like light blogging tools. It’s just that the tags are automatically aggregated. So, I tend to think of tagging as not like blogging.
July 21st, 2005 at 12:39 am
One cool feature of Scuttle is that you can add boolean searches for your tags. For example, if you’re browsing the “social bookmarking” tag, you get a “Related Tags” column; clicking one of the related tags lets you browse that tag. However, there is a plus sign that adds the term and does a boolean search for you, so when you click the plus next to “diy” you get marks tagged with both “social bookmarking” AND “diy”. (See here.) I think this would be advantageous for a school system in that teachers could search for topic and grade level, such as “horses AND grades 3-5 AND fiction”.
You can do something similar with del.icio.us but it’s not as convenient. If you view all tags and search for multiple terms, they are combined (AND). The related tags links, however, don’t allow you to do this boolean search like Scuttle.
Scuttle is very young, though, and has some drawbacks: you can’t include tags in a search, no “bookmarked by n other users.” BUT if you run it on your own server you *shouldn’t* have to worry about it going out of business ;)
July 21st, 2005 at 1:03 am
install your own tagging/bookmarking system. connotea - you can find it on sourceforge. good luck
July 21st, 2005 at 7:34 am
BTW, in my last response, I meant “I tend to think of tagging as like blogging”, not “I tend to think of tagging as not like blogging”. Overall, I find your site a tremendous resource. I’m interested in this tagging=wikis idea and what that means exactly.
July 21st, 2005 at 11:21 am
Thanks for the comments guys.
Going off on a (probably) worthwhile tangent I agree with you Bud that tagging is definitely ‘to a degree link-blogging-lite’ (plus the social aspects) and it’s fascinating to see the two evolve. After our Folksonomies conversation (http://incsub.org/blog/2005/folksonomies) I think I can see where and how that tagging might play a role in that area… but in this one I’m not sure.
I guess the thing which comes up over and over again in my head is ‘WHY?’ - why would people bother to tag / social bookmark these sites… what would be the motivation (besides philanthropic) in this case? I think this has always been the problem and I’m not convinced that for all this technology we’re any closer to motivating people to collectively share, create and maintain a resource (I’ve argued at length about why people will do this in a centred, individual fashion but in this collective sense… hmmmm) delicious / jots / flickr / technorati tags (to a degree) work because of the facilities they provide for the individual, the social aspects being more of a spin off.
I do like the look of Connotea and I agree that you should *definitely* not be doing this with a 3rd party app - unless you also use something like xml-rpc to process that onto owned software - so thanks for that link Jim.
However, that still doesn’t get us off the ‘why would you bother’ front. Sure people like to bookmark, but they want online bookmarks for *themselves* and tagging / describing bookmarks is a whole different ball game.
The more I think about this the more I reckon it’s a bit of an impossible dream and that probably the best way to do it would be to make it a collaborative project, have links / resources grouped by each year (the aim of each project being to outdo the last year)m and possibly get it created through a wiki… although there are plenty of good CMS solutions which might work just as well / better.
or am I just being negative?
Here’s a negative wikilink that you might find interesting Bud: http://incsub.org/blog/2005/whywikireallyworksnot
Cheers, James
July 22nd, 2005 at 4:41 pm
You guys have no doubt seen Alan Levine’s post asking people to collaborate around the “edpdonline” tag to build a links resource for online educational professional development…
Dunno about you guys, but I use that tag whenever I come accross something useful for edpd, as well as all the other tags I might use myself. del.icio.us/tag/edpdonline is slowly developing into a pretty useful resource, but the currency will inevitably become an issue. For that, I subscribe to the RSS of that tag site. With bloglines, I can view the last few hours, days, weeks or all of that tag site.
What we need I think, is for that RSS or tag to display on a wiki, where we can see the collective results, add reviews, and delete dead links… wikispaces.org is all most there. They have a feature that displays Flickr tags…
As for the why would we bother question… I think we are still waiting for the free and open source philosophy to reach critical mass. Social tagging, Creative Commons Search, etc will surely have an influence on our economic models… just needs a little time, and a lot of promotion by us.
An interesting recording of the Radio National Program All In the Mind - Social Prosthetics - How You’re on My Mind.
“…You’ve heard of survival of the fittest, that waging war is “natural”, and that our altruistic tendencies are ultimately selfish in motivation. Today, these beliefs about human nature inform the machinations of everything from business culture to the classroom. But are we really hard-wired to compete? This week, the biology of caring takes centre-stage. Our relationships with others are akin to social prosthetics for the mind, argues one leading Harvard psychologist. We’re hardwired to care as much as we are to compete, says another, and the clues lie in the biology of our brains…”
And then of course, Steven Downes talking about his ideas against tagging and for something better…
July 22nd, 2005 at 5:41 pm
Perhaps this whole notion of collecting and categorising a ‘professional library of online teaching resources’ for prospective teachers is only feasible for librarians & really a ‘hangover’ from the mid-90s when the www was manageable! After this valuable discussion, I’m tending towards simply sending our student teachers to EdNa, Merlot, the Learning Federation & other digital repositories for their ‘grand collection of e-learning gems’ & simply encouraging them to start their own ‘personal digital libraries & collections’ & using bloglines as Leigh wisely suggests.
btw, read an interesting article by Beagrie (05) this morning that gives an interesting take on the whole notion of ‘personal digital collections’ at:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june05/beagrie/06beagrie.html
i suspect in the longterm, there could be some useful ways forward here too for people builkding their professional identities.
July 22nd, 2005 at 6:12 pm
I think you’re right on Mathew. Rather than asking (requiring) ‘learners’ to go to a central links bank or what ever, better off showing how to build there own (learning how to learn) and suggesting that they take a look at other more mature builds if they need to find more. After all, the big big picture is that through more and more people building links to stuff, the good stuff will stand out - ala Google… so I guess what we might benefit most from are some high quality resources that demonstrate web based book marks and the usefulness of social software…
July 23rd, 2005 at 1:35 pm
Yeh, I think I’d agree too… it’s all about individual aggregation… did someone say centred communication? :o) Fascinating discussion BTW… thanks to everyone!
July 23rd, 2005 at 8:11 pm
hmmmm - OK - can I through a spanner in the works?
I have a large corporate group currently tagging away through Delicious and pulling all of that into our LMS….they absolutely love the process and the sharing of resources.
We have an agreed tag process and as they gather research for their project the whole resource is becoming an amazing eclectic collection of terrific references….
So - from the learners experience - it’s been a cracker!
July 23rd, 2005 at 9:39 pm
I s’pose that’s what I mean by making it project based… perhaps. So having lots of (competing / thematically varied) sets over time rather than one overriding ‘resource’ area…
July 23rd, 2005 at 10:29 pm
great discussion! What Anne BB mentions, “I have a large corporate group currently tagging away through Delicious and pulling all of that into our LMS….they absolutely love the process and the sharing of resources.” We’ve created an enterprise tool - Ideascape - from a few oss projects that pulls in tagged objects from delicious, flickr, technorati, etc. What’s really amazing is that the clients we have do not want to share what they are doing with our system - secret ya know. I’ll tell ya this - they feel invigorated! Managers often wondered what their employees were doing surfing the net - now they know. Yes, they are delighted.
July 25th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
Just a quick thought. We are in the process of creating a learning community built on tags and blog aggregation. I see tagging working two ways: (1) To create Internet visibility for your group or individual site; (2) As a way to navigate the web. BTW, tagging has really worked to increase technorati’s visibility. Have a look here:
http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/06/microformats_pr.html
for an analysis of how that worked. It can work for individual tagging sites too.
July 26th, 2005 at 12:15 am
Hey Bud, the problem with technorati is you get a closed tag not suitable for distribution to other services.
see the conversation on http://www.corante.com/getreal/archives/2005/07/24/open_tags_made_for_a_distributed_world.php
July 26th, 2005 at 1:32 am
[...] idea.zanestate.edu/archives/2005/07/192/” rel=”bookmark”> There’s been some discussion over at incsub about whether new-ish tools len [...]
July 27th, 2005 at 11:28 am
Sorry for coming in late in this conversation, but:
“Matthew’s after something which is:
a) more student-driven & collaborative i.e.. by our prospective student teachers
b) easy to search and find useful resources and
c) (somehow?) free from ‘link-rot’ …
…obviously there’s wiki potential here (but that doesn’t help currently relevant or link-rot issues)”
Why doesn’t Wikipedia suffer significantly from link-rot? … one reason that I can think is because there are thousands of “students” and “professionals” who have an invested interest in the content of each article, with new contributors appearing all the time.
I reckon when developing a new collaborative resource, we need to make it applicable, interesting and worthwhile to the largest audience possible (world-wide), while still somehow retaining the contextual usefulness for our immediate situation. I’m trying this out at the moment with Webdesign@Wikiversity - gradually building something that will hopefully be useful world-wide, while still providing a way to link learning to a national qualification framework in each country…. a resource that students and facilitators around the world can update and improve… whether it works or not, I’m hoping I’ll learn something through the process (here’s the initial idea for WebDesign@Wikiversity)!
In short, obviously the link-rot can be avoided with greater collaboration, but this might only be possible by using collaborative resources with a world-wide audience (such as Wikibooks) to build something that is universally worthwhile… just wish I know how to do that!
July 27th, 2005 at 11:46 am
You are right on Michael! RIGHT ON! Have you added a link to your wikiversity course on the wikipedia entry for web design?
I think that if once you are happy with the initial effort you have made, you will need to spend about 12 months spreading the word like you’ve done here. I will now spread the word on your behalf and hopefully interest will build. It may be a bit early yet, given that many teachers out there haven’t even heard of a wiki (web design teachers included!) but in 12 months, who knows…
To my mind, your approach is the ONLY feasable option if we are serious about finding a way to develop teaching resource sustainably, collaboratively, and cheaply!
I think all we need now, is an easy way to create a newsreader within a wikipage so that will display RSS feeds from various sources, especially tag pages.
July 27th, 2005 at 6:07 pm
Yes, the wikiversity idea is very appealing. Definitely.
I guess could be anal here and go on about how this reflects content-focused approaches to higher ed and all that… but I won’t as that’s hardly helpful…
It’s got a similar kindof principle to wikipedia there which is what I like, universal appeal, relatively fixed material, lots of different perspectrives and a crowd of people that, while they’ll take a while to get onto the technology, are entirely cut out for this kind of thing.
July 27th, 2005 at 8:09 pm
Thanks for not being anal James ;-) … I’m hoping it’ll not be content focused. From the WebDesign homepage:
The second topic is “Using the Internet as a Learning Tool”, which I’m hoping will eventually help learners get actively involved in their own learning network.
It’d be great if a significant part of the learning with a Wiki-course was evaluating and updating the structure, links to resources and activities - taking ownership of the learning… but maybe that’s a bit optimistic?