You got your formal taxonomy in my folksonomy–No, you got your …
Since writing about my work on Scuttledu I’ve read a couple of comments (thanks for the post, James!) that seem to miss the point of what I’m after. It may be easier to talk about what Scuttledu is not. It’s not a formal link archive of use to educators, although my initial idea for customizing Scuttle started with discussion about what I called “linkfest” pages, or what Alan referred to today as “Link-a-toriums.”
Scuttledu does not require you to contribute anything to a community. The community is expected to be based on membership in the teacher club; however, just like Furl, Del.icio.us, Jots, Blinklist, Linkroll, Netvouz, Spurl, Simpy, Del.irio.us, Connotea, CiteULike, Blogmarks, Wists, and Unalog, there is no expectation that you do anything other than tag your bookmarks however you see fit. The user should not feel like he or she has to do anything nor make a commitment beyond using the system for his or her own personal use. When a person uses any of the other social bookmarking services mentioned, does she honestly think about what she is doing in relation to some broader community? Oh wait, I’m bookmarking a site on the staplers of the 1940’s, I’d better be sure I fulfill my obligation to the other folks out there who are also interested in staplers of the 1940’s.
Do any of the other services mentioned above require that you use the built-in “social” features? How many people actually use them for these social features and how many use them for the simple convenience of keeping their bookmarks in an easily accessible place?
Scuttledu does not try to impose a formal taxonomy on users; if users don’t want to tag their bookmarks with grade level and subject area tags, they don’t have to. It is interesting to note, however, that there have been some attempts by del.icio.us users to use community-defined tags. Emily writes about her experience in the nptech tagging experiment:
I first started using nptech to tag my bookmarks that I already found that were nonprofit technology related. I wanted to share my links with others. Since my interest is in designing websites for nonprofits, I started sharing bookmarks related to that.
As I spent more time tagging nptech, I started sharing blogs and articles about nonprofit blogging. I also started sharing websites and articles about usability, accessibility, and anything else web design related that nonprofits might be interested in.
I also browse the nptech tag stream on del.icio.us to see what other nonprofit resources nptech taggers are tagging.
You can browse what the nptech taggers contributed to del.icio.us.
Alan tried to get people to use the tag edpdonline when bookmarking sites about online professional development for educators. You can see the results here.
What Scuttledu does do, though, is offer to tag bookmarks with grade level and subject area automatically for those that choose to use that feature. Let’s let the users decide if they find these tags useful. My hunch is that a third grade teacher browsing the tag “science” would sure benefit from seeing the related tag “grades 3-5″ in the sidebar so he could skip all the college physics sites. In this sense, I’d say the grade you teach is pretty important. When Scuttledu is finished, users will be able to browse by subject area and grade level.
Scuttledu doesn’t really try to do anything different from all the other social bookmarking services other than offer to include two tags. I don’t know if people will like this feature, but there’s only one way to find out.
August 31st, 2005 - 9:35 am
Hi -
I think the idea of helping educators our with preset tags is a sound one.
As a lecturer in a distance education university I have started at looking at ways of using del.icio.us bookmarks to provide feeds of current/topical websites/news stories to augment web delivered teaching material that doesn’t necessarily change very much year on year (here are some of my blog posts on academic bookmarking).
Becuase I wanted to try a variety of models, i set up a couple of del.icio.us accounts (my personal one, a course specific one etc) and have been trying to use them to find an efficient way of working.
For my ‘course account’ it would be handy if links were tagged automatically with the course code. Similalry, for a student, i can see how it would be handy if, whilst they were using an academic social bookmarking tool as part of their course(s), they were provided with a quick and obvious (perhaps default) way to tag a page for a particular course, alongside the baffling array of personal tags they are likely to use to describe the actual content.
As an isntructir, the social element of seeing student’s bookmarks can perhaps help identify:
1) topics where students are having to find additional resources;
2) identify sites that students are bookmarking heavily; it may be that a rating facility is also useful in this respect.
By default, i guess there are a couple of major reasons for bookmarking a site:
1) we rate it highly.
2) we ploughing through a list of search results and flagging ones - based on a quick inspection - to look at later. (this is like defaul tagging everything with a weak ‘toread’, perhaps (’tocheck’?)?
If people were allowed to rate sites in a negative way, it may be useful to users who use the second approach (in the extreme, I guess you could refer to these as indiscriminate bookmarkers..?)
Is the trial still ongoing? Any chance of a play?;-)
August 31st, 2005 - 9:52 am
Tony, thanks for the comment. I’m curious as to why you use multiple accounts when you could just point your students to a specific tag in del.icio.us? But what I gather from your comments makes sense to me. We all have various online identities. It would be nice if our bookmarking tools recognized this and let us choose different profiles as we go about our day. One moment I might be working on faculty develoment, the next I’m a web designer, then I’m a programmer, then I’m a student, etc.
I think what I would like to see scuttledu do, then, is let the user choose some default tags for bookmarks (which you could turn on and off), but these tags could be any that the user chooses, not just the grade level and subject area as it currently stands. Let me think on this some more and consult my php/mysql guru.
September 1st, 2005 - 6:43 am
“I’m curious as to why you use multiple accounts when you could just point your students to a specific tag in del.icio.us?”
Because I’m only semi-social
More particulalry, I wanted to distinguish between a personal account and a role account - that is, the secondary delicious a/c was owned and maintained by the course instructir role, rather than personal me as course instructor. The reason for this separation was to give the role a/c additional weight, and perhaps fulfil an ‘adminstration role’ as in using live links.
For example, if I had a delicious or connotea clone running on one of our own servers, I could envisage course admin accounts being created automatically whenever a new course was registred with the VLE, say, to be maintained by whoever is in the role of leading, or editing, the course. The a/c is then temporarily looked after by one or more people fulfilling the role.
[The following is a stream of consciousness ramble…]
Having one a/c would be easier of course… I guess what i would like to be able to do is the following for example (using delicious syntax because i am most familiar with that):
1) set up my personal account: del.icio.us/psychemedia, say
2) set up a profile: del.icio.us/psychemedia/profile/t184
3) alias this to del.icio.us/t184 - if i am not permitted to post to that profile (form a permissions setting in the t184 a/c), then I guess that the tag would default to del.icio.us/psychemedia/t184
4a) tag something as eg del.icio.us/psychemedia/profile/t184/lesson1 at which point it is also added as del.icio.us/t184/lesson1 and del.icio.us/psychemedia/t184/lesson1 (but tagging del.icio.us/psychemedia/t184/lesson1 DOES NOT post to del.icio.us/psychemedia/profile/t184/lesson1)
4b) Alternatively, on my ‘bookmark this’ tool, have a check box that selects my t184 profile
[4c) hmm - if I could set up permissions in delicio.us/t184 so that posts to del.icio.us/psychemedia/t184/lesson1 were always automatically added to del.icio.us/t184/lesson1 i couldn’t (as psychemedia) make ‘personal’ bookmarks to t184 as i can in 4a…]
5) you could use a similar approach for groups(i haven;t tried group bookmarking yet so don;t know exactly how it works in legacy systems and things like connotea): del.icio.us/psychemedia/group/projectTeam1 aliased to a permission regulated a/c del.icio.us/projectTeam1 - this distinction allows you a level of filtering (and control - such as closed groups) over and above just using tag filters, such as del.icio.us/tag/projectTeam1. It also means that you can separate out tags you want to share with other (closed) group members from personal tags.
[6. for a closed group, you would prevent del.icio.us/psychemedia/profile/t184/lesson1 also being added as del.icio.us/psychemedia/t184/lesson1]
Here are some cases I shall think on to try and work out how this stuff could be used
1) feeding livelinks into online course material from a course admin role
2) providing bookmarks from an instructor’s personal homepage (more informal than livelinks)
3) an instructor researching a course
4) closed/competing project groups NOT wanting to share links with other groups
5) groups happy to share links with others
Should students and instructors have different ‘weight’ or authority associated with their links?
Should links be shared across cohorts of students?
How about where bookmarks are created as part of some sort of assessed exercise?