BP05_20091201_SocialBookmarking (de.licio.us)

Social Bookmarking

What is it?

Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. Bookmarking, on the other hand, is the practice of saving the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. To create a collection of social bookmarks, you register with a social bookmarking site, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or private. Some sites periodically verify that bookmarks still work, notifying users when a URL no longer functions. Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that registered users have created and saved.

How does it work?

Social bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources. The creator of a bookmark assigns tags to each resource, resulting in a user-directed, “amateur” method of classifying information. Because social bookmarking services indicate who created each bookmark and provide access to that person’s other bookmarked resources, users can easily make social connections with other individuals interested in just about any topic. Users can also see how many people have used a tag and search for all resources that have been assigned that tag. In this way, the community of users over time will develop a unique structure of keywords to define resources—something that has come to be known as a “folksonomy.”

What are the downsides?

By definition, social bookmarking is done by amateurs. There is no oversight as to how resources are organized and tagged. This can lead to inconsistent or otherwise poor use of tags. For example, if a user saves a bookmark for a site with information about greyhounds but only tags the site with the term “greyhound” and not also with “dogs” or perhaps “dog racing,” that resource might never be found by someone looking for information about breeds of dogs. Because social bookmarking reflects the values of the community of users, there is a risk of presenting a skewed view of the value of any particular topic. For example, users might assign pejorative tags to certain resources. In addition, social bookmarking means storing data in yet another location that you have to maintain and update.

Where is it going?

The technology behind social bookmarking is not complex, which means the threshold to participate is low, both for Web sites offering such services and for users. The ideas that social bookmarking is built on are working their way into other applications; the practice of tagging information is being extended to other types of resources, such as multimedia files and e-mail. This shift away from formal taxonomies may have important implications for how user communities are born and how they function. As the landscape for online resources changes and new systems of classifying those resources emerge and mature, the design and function of databases themselves may ultimately be changed to accommodate new ways of managing information.

What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Tagging information resources with keywords has the potential to change how we store and find information. It may become less important to know and remember where information was found and more important to know how to retrieve it using a framework created by and shared with peers and colleagues. Social bookmarking simplifies the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers, and other resources among peers or students.

Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service, which means you can save all your bookmarks online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It also means that we can show you the most popular bookmarks being saved right now across many areas of interest. In addition, our search and tagging tools help you keep track of your entire bookmark collection and find tasty new bookmarks from people like you.

Please watch the video below.

What the video teaches

"Social Bookmarking in Plain English" introduces the basics of bookmarking services like Delicious.com. The video uses an example of teachers using Social Bookmarking to share links to useful websites. The video includes:

The difference between online and offline bookmarks

How to use a bookmarking website

An introduction to organizing bookmarks with tags

The value of sharing bookmarks with others

My de.licio.us has been posted to my iGoogle site.

My de.licio.us site is:

http://delicious.com/tkfullsail

Resources

Common Craft. (August 8, 2007). Social bookmarking in plain English. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english

Educause. (May, 2005). 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf

Yahoo. (2009). Learn More about Delicious. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from http://delicious.com/help/learn

BP04_20091201_Tool#1 (Movylo)

The Web 2.0 tool I chose to research is an exciting place devoted to developing free mobile websites. You never have to be out-of-the-loop when your laptop is not handy or not charged or wifi is not available

has created an online source for the rest of us to use to create a multitude of content made just for cell phones.

“Create your mobile site and blog. Movylo has everything you need to easily create a mobile site or a blog. Movylo gives you a mix of smart tools and features to create your mobile site, all you need to do is to upload your digital contents and Movylo will do the rest. Movylo will convert, resize and adjust all your contents to fit any mobile phone.” (Movylo, 2009)

You no longer have to exist in a cellular world without the advantages of mobile pages, blogs, contests, emails, and more. Movylo has created a Web 2.0 tool that allows you to build a vast array of mobile content that will keep you, and your friends, busy for a long time.

I am attaching a few demonstration videos from the Movylo website to show you just how easy this site is to use for creating all the mobile content you need. Should you require any further information, or wish to join this community, please visit http://www.movylo.com. In addition, please visit my mobile blog on your cell phone at http://tk00.movylo.com and leave me a comment or two. You have to register before commenting, but always remember to think outside the box.

I believe I can use this tool for this class to share and collaborate with fellow classmates during homework assignments. As I grow in it’s use, I plan to create a number of mobile pages to open new lines of communication with many people from friends and family to education professionals and colleagues. I have already created an educational blog and hope to have classmates contribute as soon as possible.

The Movylo Services are provided by Movylo Srl, an Italian company with registered offices in Turin (Italy), Via Cardinal Massaia 83, VAT nr. 08537140017

Kowalewski, T. (2009). ScreenShot2009_11_28a.png. [Frame]. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from http://www.movylo.com

Movylo. (2009). Create you own mobile site!. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from http://www.movylo.com

Movylo. (2009). logo_movylo.png. [Frame]. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from http://www.movylo.com

Movylo. (2009). What-is-it.php. [Video]. Retrieved November 28, 2009, from http://www.movylo.com

BP03_20091201_EduUses4Blogs (The Machine is US/ing Us)

“From the first words ever spoken to the last time you told a lie, stories have been told throughout history. These analog stories are sometimes factual, sometimes exaggerations, sometimes imagination, but are always creations from the mind of the storyteller. In some respects, these analog accounts are the history of mankind recorded in text (and perhaps images) on scrolls, parchment, paper, and even cave walls.

With the advent of technology in the 20^th century, mankind has developed another method for relaying storytelling to more people, more often, but not any less exaggerated, or built from imagination, than the analog methods of the past. The World Wide Web, the Internet, mobile messages, and more, have provided the digital storyteller with a number of avenues to spread the word to the “parchment” of the computer screen, the “scrolls” of the Internet, the “cave walls” of our home theater system, and the slips of “paper” in text messaging.

Digital has taken the world from ink and paper to picture elements in some formats that didn’t exist even a decade ago. Stories, however, have remained pretty much the same as exaggerations, fictions, skewed facts, outright lies, imaginations, and truths, still filling the minds of humanity with the dialogs or propaganda of the teller or podcaster or blogger.” (Kowalewski, 2009)

The blog and the blogger have become the town criers of our time. Some blogs are factual and some are not. As these storytellers proclaim our history in the present tense and record their sagas for all to see and hear, we, as digital citizens, can comment on all their words of wisdom.

We have come a long way in communication, but have a long way to go in education. Many schools do not allow students to post or comment on blogs and some school boards do not allow staff members to participate in this Web 2.0 communication either. How do we proceed? We must educate the educators, so everyone can benefit. While I understand the need for privacy, especially younger students, I also understand the need for communication. What is the answer? Again, we must educate the educators in order for them to educate the community.

A Blog is an online journal (a weblog), a webpage, that allows users to post content and get feedback via comments. New developments in plug-ins like Widgets, give Bloggers fun options for sharing their world with their audience. Teacher Blogs range from journals to course management tools. Student Blogs in English classes are often spaces for literary reflection, but they could be anything the student and teacher can envision.

True bloggers don't only write blogs, they read them, comment on them, and therefore participate in a community of ideas.

• Interactive; comments and RSS feeds
• Ownership; your own space, making your own decisions about contenct and design, or "agency" as Janet Murray calls it
• Authentic audience
• Transformative: write a blog post as a reaction to another blog post and get comments that you can also react to
  • What can I learn from you & what can you learn from me?
    • The teacher is no longer the only source of information; she is not responsible for making all the connections.
  • Blogs can push reading, writing, and thinking up the taxonomy; students are synthesizing and evaluating!
• Blogs in Plain English (a cool video that explains it "all") see below

(Used with permission from the author)

Hogue, D. February 8, 2008. Blogs, Wikis, & Web 2.0 in the Classroom. Retrieved November 25, 2009, from http://www.mshogue.com/wsra_08.htm

Kowalewski, T. September 16, 2009. Digital Storytelling in a web 2.0 world. Retrieved from personal collection.

Please watch the videoes from YouTube linked below:

BP02_20091201_RSSFeeds (Google_Reader)

I have chosen (1)Apple Support and (2)Apple Learning Interchange for information about Apple and all products.

I have also chosen (3)rss.fullsail.com to make sure I am up-to-date with our school.

I have chosen (4)Web 2.0 Journal to keep up with news in the Web20 world.

I have also chosen a few (5)classmates to make sure I am following assignments as best I can.

BP01_20091201_iGoogleScreenShots

Apple Learning Interchange

The new Apple Learning Interchange (ALI) is a set of free resources for educators that provides a single access point to find media and ideas for classroom activities produced by their peers, by Apple, and by guest content providers like Ball State University and The National Park Foundation.

Educators can now connect with social networking tools that facilitate collaboration with each other through simple searching, messaging, iChat and collaborative publication tools. Additionally any member can submit projects as simple as classroom snapshots or as complex as multi-page abstracts for assessment, enhancement, and peer review.

The Apple Learning Interchange contains items of interest to both K-12 and Higher Education members. You can use the popup menu on the front page of the site to choose whether you are interested in K-12, Higher Education, or both. Once made this choice will affect your experience of the site, by filtering out non-relevant content from general browsing and searching. You can change this setting at any time via the channel menu on the front page of the site.

The Apple Learning Interchange:

Provides a beautiful and easy-to-use interface for browsing, searching, and rating everything from multi-page lesson ideas to simple classroom snapshots.

Enables educators to connect with each other around personal, professional, geographical, or interest-based characteristics using internal messaging systems, public conversations and iChat integration

Allows educators to build and submit their own projects for assessment, enhancement, and peer review using simple but powerful integration with “iLife” and other authoring applications

User-configurable profile and preference pages allow educators to quickly find, access and/or share the kind of classroom content they're interested in

Using the Apple Learning Interchange

The Apple Learning Interchange is designed to work well with all modern standards-compliant browsers. Cookies must be enabled in your browser for login and many other site functions to work.

Much of the Interchange's content exists in the form of media files. Some of these media files require appropriate browser plug-ins for viewing. If you have a Macintosh computer running Mac OS X, simply make sure you keep it up to date with Software Update and you will always be to view the Apple Learning Interchange's content.

I use, and recommend, many ALI media files often, both at my school, and to Full Sail students in my EMDT classes. The above document explains much of the ALI available to many educators throughout the world. I have also published here as well.

Apple. (2009). About the apple learning interchange. Retrieved November 24, 2009, from http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/story.php?itemID=9402

email

please use my gmail account to send info at

tkfullsail@gmail.com