Technology – Page 24 – Silence and Voice

My Strategy for Using Del.icio.us Tags for Bookmarks

I have been struggling to keep track of and organize all the websites I need to save, review, re-visit, and frequent. This would be easy if I used one computer with one browser, but I travel between my computer / browser combination at work and the three browsers I use on my computer at home. How can I maintain all the websites–academic, professional, personal, private, and needed for future research–between all these machines and locations?

I think I finally found a way to do it using a feature that I rarely used before in the simplest social bookmark application, del.icio.us.

I have had an account on del.icio.us for some time, but have never figured out how to use it to organize my online life. I do not use it much for the social bookmarking as it was intended, but some of the features to allow this to happen work really well meeting my organizational needs.

After reading Gene Smith’s wonderful book on Tagging and attending his tagging presentation while at Northern Voice 2008, I have been thinking about more creative uses of using tags for personal use, rather than just thinking about them for social purposes. I have started to use the tags on the right of my del.icio.us page in the same way I would use folders, as concept organizers.

For example, I need to get to the log-on page for an online class I am taking at CIIS, so I saved it as a bookmark on del.icio.us and tagged it “ciis.” As I have currently have 170 web pages / sites bookmarked, it can be a challenge to locate that particular one in the del.icio.us list.

To get to this page, I click the del.icio.us shortcut on my browser and then I can see the first 100 of my bookmarked pages / websites.

It is here that I use the tags on the right side of the page as organizational “folders” or conceptual groupings. I look for my own tag that I created and associated with that web page when I saved it to del.icio.us, and click on it. For CIIS, there are two separate web pages I need to access, and clicking the CIIS tag brings both of them together on one page, ready for me to select and go there. Voila, I now have the direct bookmark to the site I need, accessible from any computer I use.

Now that I have created this system and it seems that it works for me, I will go through my del.icio.us bookmarks to clean-up and better standardize the tags to associate them with how I think. If it helps others in a social bookmarking folksonomy manner, then that is wonderful! However, with the amount of information and data I need to sort and crunch, I will not be able to contribute much if I cannot even find my own saved items!

BarCampNYC3 – Just Got My Ticket!

I just got a ticket for BarCampNYC3, which is scheduled to take place on March 15 & 16 at Polytechnic University, in Brooklyn.

I have never been to a barcamp, so do not know exactly what to expect. As I understand it is an unconference and do not know many of the attendees, I am looking forward to a really interesting time.

Let’s see, I need to suggest a session or topic I could facilitate. Perhaps something on liveblogging or autoethnographic blogging research?

I understand there may be a few tickets remaining . . .

Technorati Tags: BarCampNYC3

Scrabulous in the New York Times

Anybody see the article in today’s New York Times about Scrabulous? I learned that Scrabulous is not only available on Facebook, but also via email and with signing into Facebook.

This recalls a recent discussion we had in the SCoPE educational technology community. I think the Times article is somewhat balanced, showing some of the complexities of the issue from the makers of Scrabble and how the increasing use and influence of social media is changing our perceptions of entertainment and free use. It seems like such a case of infringing on copyright, but the comparison between the use of this game and digital music was interesting.

I wish they would have talked about how sales of the physical board game were doing, before as well as after this game started to grow in popularity on Facebook. Are they selling more, less, or the same? Should that influence how the makers partner with or sue the designers of the electronic version. Is there a difference between when the originators of Scrabulous created it for fun and now, as they make roughly $25k a month in adverting? What do anybody else think?

Perhaps now would be a good time to enter careers in intellectual property and digital media rights?

Technorati Tags: scrabulous,facebook,nytimes,scope

Northern Voice; Post-Reflection

So, Northern Voice is finished. What to do with it now?

I think I will let my blogging tagline guide me for my next step as I begin my debrief:

Reflective practice in organizational learning, educational technology, and postmodern society.

Reflective Practice

I want, or rather need, to continue to reflect on my experiences. This reflection is critical to my learning. Writing new blog posts after having liveblogged every session I attended at nv08, Tweeting, and reviewing my Flickr photos to help me recall forgotten moments are all conscious choices I am making to foster my own grounding and creative development. So much content and experiences and learning so quickly was overwhelming. Strange how writing, even here, helps me to process it all.

Organizational Learning

I did not attend nv08 alone. I started to read more blogs and Tweets of people who I knew before the conference, as well as people I met while there. My FeedDemon feeds (kept current on my blog) have been working overtime, and I think that I will be adding to these in the coming week or so as I recall people who I wanted to follow but did not add them at the time.

Educational Technology

I learned edubloggers are more varied than I initially thought. For many years when I thought about edubloggers, K-12 jumped to my mind. Having met so many who teach adults, I felt more at home than I thought I would. I am actively demonstrating what I am learning via technology by committing to more actively comment than I have done in the past. I want to read and join in a community with others who have similar interests and skills and experiences and challenges. As writing helps me to learn, perhaps sharing this with others on their own social media outlets may engage others in conversation and continue the learning in new and exciting directions.

Postmodern Society

Is there a common Northern Voice attendee? Is there a common worldview there? Platform? Favorite technology? Coolest accessible app? Best approach to social media? What does it mean to have a “personal blogging and social media” conference in person at all, given the topic? Should there be a virtual conference mid-year to debrief, check-in, and prepare for the February event?

It feels liberating to consider NV within the context of my blog’s tagline. Hey, if it does not fit there, then the tagline needs to evolve. Glad to see the revised (current) one I developed a few weeks ago, after working on it for weeks, seems to be just right. For now, at least.

Technorati Tags: nv08,northernvoice,reflective practice

Northern Voice on Flickr Hot Tag List

I was looking for Flickr pictures of Northern Voice 2008 using the nv08 tag, and was pleasantly surprised to see both nv08 as well as moosecamp listed as Hot tags over the last week. Great to have been part of something that shows up on Flickr with this much influence!

My full-size screenshot of this is now on Flickr adding to the nv08 tags, too!