May 24, 2007
Workshop: Social Bookmarking, sort of...
Yesterday afternoon, I gave a 'partial attention' workshop on Social Bookmarking, sort of... for the OU's e-learning community (eLC), a growing network of people from all over the OU with a particular interest in elearning related technologies.
The eLC, under the guidance of Chris Pegler, has events booked in every few weeks, often wrapped around an informal networking lunch, today being no exception. I got the afternoon session, following a great session in the morning by Adam Joinson on "privacy" (I'll try and post some notes on that talk in the next few days). Whilst there was some crossover between attendees of the two sessions, there were also a few differences too, which I took to be a sign that the events are providing a good balance in accommodating the wide variety of interests and information needs of the members of the community.
Anyway, a copy of my slides (such as they are) are available on slideshare and links to some of the sites I talked about are available on this H2O Social Bookmarking - sort of... playlist :
I didn't get a chance to annotate the slides before uploading them, but the gist of the story I tried to tell was this...
When I started using delicious as a bookmarking tool, I used it largely for collecting links to web pages that I thought I might want to revisit at a later stage. As delicious grew, and my personal link collection grew, it became increasingly useful as a resource discovery tool. In particular, I'm thinking here of opportunities for discovery via pivot searching about links, people and tags.
Over time, I've started to think that social bookmarking as an approach generalises to the generation of collections of resources by agents. Resources are also labelled with meaningful keys - tags, labels, keywords, metadata - that can be used to index resources within the collection (as well as being used to key sub-collections).
Agents may be people, groups, or even algorithms - live resource collections (Okay - this is all a bit flaky still; particularly claiming a saved search - or filtered set of feeds - produces a collection in the sense that a person collecting a set of links and tagging them in the same way is. Or a collection of links in a course unit or H2O playlist is in some way similar to an evolving bookmark collection. But I'm working on it as a spectrum thing relating to the ways in which resource collections can be generated...)
Anyway, the next step in my personal use of social bookmarking tools was to start exploring ways of using subsets of the links I had collected by pulling them out of delicious using RSS feeds (because of course we all know by now that we ignore RSS at OUr peril ;-). Exemplar uses are embedding live created lists of links in course materials (login as guest), or using them to define custom search engines such as delisearch (or more recently, OpenLearn unit search hubs).
RSS can also be used to pipe content more generally around the web, of course. Something I articulated to myself for the first time on Tuesday, whilst in conversation about how to promote RSS feed uptake, was that for sites I visit for new content, the feed icon brings a smile to my face because I know it means I never need to visit the site again - I can get the content sent where I want to read it :-)
(I also realised that even if you have the best RSS feed in the world, if the person you're trying to convince to use it does not subscribe to any other feeds, you are likely to do them a service by giving them the overhead of yet another place to go to consume content - feeds make sense when you aggregate lots of them in the same place, particuarly when they update over different periods.)
Dashboards like my OUseful Pageflakes dashboard or Netvibes are particularly good surfaces for providing glanceable displays that cover a wide variety of independent information sources.
As well as creating lists to web page links, bookmarking tools can also be used to collate lists of richer resources - locations on google maps, video clips on youTube, for example, slideshows on slideshare.net or documents on scribd.com (I didn't really get scribd until I saw it after playing with the Open Repository Online - I know which way I'd rather consume documents now!) (Check out the playlist for the actual links.)
For further info about future eLC events, check out the eLC website, or keep an eye on the OUseful calendar.
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