Social Bookmarking Tricks for Group Learning

Have I mentioned that I love getting questions. Recently I received two great questions, I'll address the first one in this post. The question was:

How are you posting the social bookmarking links on your site?

So let me answer that question first and then let me mention a couple of other things that you might want to do with Social Bookmarking tools.

Badges (Widgets)

The quick answer to the actual question is that I'm using a Yahoo MyWeb badge. You can see the badge creator and options (pages/cloud, tag filter, number of links, what to include) at:

http://myweb.yahoo.com/myresults/badge

It produces a badge that looks like:

and gives you the code that you will need to either paste into your post, web page, blog template, etc.

You can do the same thing on del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls and most of the other Social Bookmarking services have similar capabilities.

RSS Feed With Search Results (and Subscribing)

In my article on Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools, I described a scenario where a workgroup would independently research a particular topic, e.g., Rapid eLearning, and would share those links under a particular tag, e.g., "rapid".

One neat trick using Social Bookmarking tools, is that you can easily create an RSS Feed for a particular term. In Yahoo MyWeb, there's an XML Button in the bottom right of result pages. I simply click that button and it will show me a page with a bunch of XML code. Anytime that search results is updated the RSS feed will be updated.

Now, the really neat part. You can easily subscribe to that feed. The URL of the XML code might be something like:

http://myweb.yahoo.com/mywebrss/tag/elearning/urls.xml

For me, all I have to do is either manually go to bloglines and subscribe, or use the trick of putting "bloglines.com/sub/" in front of the URL, e.g.,

bloglines.com/sub/http://myweb.yahoo.com/mywebrss/tag/elearning/urls.xml

I now will see any pages that are being tagged with eLearning. There are several researchers who use this approach publicly in order to allow people to share links on services like del.icio.us. See: http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/2006/02/thinking-out-loud-our.htm for an example by Nancy White.

Which Tool?

If you look at the recent comparsion on Read/Write Web, you'll get a sense of some of the features of the different tools. But, I've commented before that I think Yahoo MyWeb better than del.icio.us, rollyo, et.al. for Personal / Group Learning and it comes down to:

• Saving copies of pages
• Limiting who sees what links
• Full-text search of contents of bookmarked pages

I'm hoping that eventually Yahoo MyWeb and del.icio.us merge (Yahoo owns both after acquiring del.icio.us).

The Learning Circuits Blog: DevLearn Handouts and A Success Story: Elearning and Instructional Design Musings

Whoops, yesterday I posted a link to my recent presentation on the wrong blog. You can find the post with my thoughts around a direct success story from the presentation on LCB at:

The Learning Circuits Blog: DevLearn Handouts and A Success Story: Elearning and Instructional Design Musings

and you can find my presentation at:

What’s Now and What’s Next in e-Learning: Technologies and Practices

edited 10/19 to remove the link to other handouts.

Ultimate Knowledge Bank?

I was just talking about how with Blogs, Wikis and Social Networks, we were on the path to trying to make it easy to have content get created as part of work and have it available to others in controlled ways. I said at the time that what we needed was something that would record everything we did or thought. I just saw this article:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/10/16/explorers.memory/index.html

It certainly makes you think about the longer term implications of learning and technology are in a world where we have access to all information stored by everyone.

Closing the Gap 2006

It is that time of year again when I make the annual pilgrimage to the Minneapolis , MN for the 2006 Closing the Gap Conference. If you have never been to this conference it is a lot of fun. It is a chance to connect with other educators in the field of assistive technology and to share our stories of working with students, teachers, and families. With hundreds of lectures, workshops and presentation it can be a little overwhelming but for seasoned Closing the Gappers we have a good handle on how to pace ourselves. Tomorrow night the Exhibit Hall opens for us to preview what is new and soon to be released products. I am always on the prowl for the next great assistive technology tool or software application. I know that Don Johnston will be showing their newly released videos called Incite and Crick Software will be showing off their new Clicker Paint program. Can't wait to see them in actions. I will be presenting on Thursday morning and again on Saturday on using Mac OSX and the accessibility features. Keep tuned in to the blog as I report on some of the highlights of the 2006 Closing the Gap Conference.

Laser TV

Just when you got used to the idea that plasma and LCD were television's state-of-the-art technologies, an entirely new approach is emerging. Earlier this month, Mitsubishi unveiled a prototype for a 50-inch laser TV.

By using laser technology, the TVs can display more colors than plasma or LCD sets. What's more, wide-screen laser TVs use less energy than other technologies, and may sell for less than $1,000 when available.

Speaking of which, don't expect laser TVs to be on Santa's sleigh this year. At the earliest, laser TVs won't reach the consumer market until next year's holiday season.

Source: Red Herring

Disease Database

When fighting diseases, physicians, pharmacists and geneticists don't always speak the same languages. Even when they do, finding treatments is a painstaking trial-and-error process. Now, a new database promises to match drug compounds with disease symptoms, helping researchers identify potential treatments much more quickly than before.

The Connectivity Map, a database being developed by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Broad Institute, uses gene-expression signatures as a common meta-language to link the behavior of certain compounds with their effects on cells.

Already, the Connectivity Map is credited with helping to identify treatments for prostate cancer and leukemia. The ultimate goal of the Broad Institute development team is to include all 1,400 drugs that are currently approved by the FDA.

Source: MIT Technology Review

DevLearn: Ze Frank Keynote - Level of Engagement

Just saw an entertaining keynote at DevLearn by Ze Frank (www.zefrank.com). He creates social media spaces with the intent of entertaining and engaging his audience. One of the things that struck me was that he sees the same 1% rule across a very large audience but believes that there are many levels of audience engagement. And challenges us to find something to satisfy users (learners) who are:

• passive
• active
• interactive

But later during Q&A, he talked about how he thinks through the challenge and he really tries ways to allow initial engagement in "one click." What can you do to begin to engage your audience with one click? A rating? A vote?