10.15.04

Del.icio.us

Posted in Software, Pedagogy and Scholarship at 12:59 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

I’ve been playing around with Joshua Schachter’s Del.icio.us “social bookmarks manager.” It’s a browser-based bookmark service. It’s social because your bookmarks are stored on a central server, where not only you, but others can see them, and even copy individual bookmarks, with a single click, to their own collection of bookmarks. In addition, bookmarks are tracked so that you can see how many others have marked a particular page, and who they are. You can even subscribe to another person’s list of Del.icio.us bookmarks.

Once you register for a free account, you can drag customized bookmarklets to your web browser’s toolbar. Whenever you find a useful site you use the bookmarklet to add it to your collection of bookmarks on the Del.icio.us server. The URL is copied automatically to a simple fill-in-the-blank form that allows you to add a short description, and a single-world category or “tag” so that you can keep your bookmarks neatly organized. You have your own “page” on the server, with a static URL (in other words, a permanent address) and there’s even an automatically generated RSS feed for each person’s bookmarks page.

Why, you ask, would you want to share your bookmarks?

  • Your bookmarks are available from any computer, any browser.
  • You can benefit from what I think of as open source data verification—you can see how popular a particular site is, and who likes it—often a good indication about the quality of content.

In part because of the Del.icio.us API, there are already a number of interesting add-ons from other developers. Brad Choate offers some helpful Del.icio.us tips for users, rather than developers. I quite like Buzz Andersen’s Cocoal.icio.us, a Mac OS X client for using Del.icio.us. Another user has posted an AppleScript for posting to Del.icio.us from Ranchero Software’s NetNewsWire. Del.icio.us is pre-alpha right now, so while I encourage you to play with Del.icio.us, make sure you backup your bookmarks. Wolf Rentzsch has some suggestions about here. Christina Zeeh has written delicious2safari, a Mac OS X client for importing Del.icio.us bookmarks into Safari. There’s even a Java version of Del.icio.us in development.

I’m especially intrigued, as my XBEL post makes clear, with the instructional possibilities of bookmarks. I often teach students and faculty to make annotated lists of bookmarks, creating a URL bibliography. Faculty often have lists of web pages they want students to use, but don’t know how to present or “publish” them. I see something like Del.icio.us offering a lot of potential for “knowledge sharing,” to use the current jargon. If you want, you can see my Del.icio.us bookmarks here, or subscribe to my Del.icio.us bookmarks RSS feed

Tiger? In March?

Posted in Macintosh at 12:13 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

I notice that according to Amazon, they’ll be shipping Tiger on March 31, 2005. Cool. I’m really looking forward to Dashboard, Spotlight, and the new Safari.

The Spouse of course, is already sweating out a new Tiger-related book about the “integrated development environment.”

10.11.04

Outsourcing Course Prep

Posted in Pedagogy and Scholarship at 1:52 pm by Lisa Spangenberg

There’s a discussion over at The Chronicle of Higher Education regarding “outsourcing” course preparation. According to the Chronicle

Many colleges that want to beef up their online course offerings are starting to buy materials developed by other institutions. . . . ? Can good courses be mass-produced in this way?

Having looked at both good and bad content for online instruction, I added my .01 here.