December 15, 2005
Community Building for Course Cohorts
The web's moving just too fast for me at the moment - Yahoo!'s purchase of del.icio.us, the announcement of the Alexa web Search Platform and this new Blogger Web Comments for Firefox extension are just three things to mention that caught my eye...
The Yahoo!/del.icio.us tie up will be an interesting one to watch via Yahoo!'s MyWeb2.0, although I suspect that that service will need opening up a little in both API and usability terms for it to really take off.
(For those of you who haven't looked at MyWeb2.0, you can bookmark and tag pages (which get archived) and set up social networks with other MyWeb2.0 users. These two elememts are combined when you search - results that have been bookmarked by members of you circle of contacts are highlighted straight after the paid-for advertising links, and above the 'normal' search results listing. As yet del.icio.us bookmarks can't be imported, but that surely is only a matter of time? It's also rather tricky getting people into your circle of contacts, whereas shareability is oh so simple and uncomplicated in del.icio.us.)
The Alexa web service - which provides users with access (for a small fee) to the Alexa index - is also another one to watch, and may lead to some interesting new search engines (Battelle briefly address this in his post on the announcement.
Finally, the Blogger web comments extension for Firefox. I guess this has something to do with Google looking for further payback on their Blogger investment, as well as making use of their blog search facility. So what does it do? Well, whenever you visit a page, you can check up to see who has blogged about the page, or post to Blogger (if you have an account there) about the page.
So is any of this interesting in a course related sense?
I think so - imagine a MyWeb2.0 like system in which all the students on a particular course are included in a group. Searching on a particular topic highlights pages that others who are taking - or who have taken - the course found useful. As well as these 'recommended' hits for the search, the user also gets the full Yahoo! search result, which may go some way towards maintaining diversity.
As far as the Blogger extension goes, being able to share thoughts about arbitrary pages on the web, although not necessarily in a conversational form, is a good way of accessing different perspectives on a particular page. Limiting access to comments that come solely from other students on a course may be an issue, of course!
And the Alexa web service? I'm working on that...:-)
Posted by ajh59 at December 15, 2005 02:22 PM