Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

Social bookmarking has been around for a while. I used ikeepbookmarks for years but there was little sharing. Furl was my first real use of social bookmarking. I used it pretty faithfully but didn’t do much sharing or looking.

I’ve recently switched over to delicious and am pretty pumped. I suppose I could have done many of the things that excites me about delicious in furl but for whatever reason didn’t. So here’s what’s so cool:

•  Networking… I can add whomever I wish to my network and have them collect some great resources for me. (0kay, they aren’t really doing it for me but I like to think of it that way)
• John Pederson recently posted about this and asked folks to leave their del.icio.us names on his blog so he could add them to his network. I’d offer the same thing. Now over time, just like blogs, you have to decide how many you can manage and if folks are looking and finding resources that interest you but in general more is better.
• RSS…I can subscribe to my network and wake up each morning to see what good things they’ve found
• FireFox extensions….I’m quite happy with the bookmarklets but the extension is a bit more powerful. I had this with Furl but found this is a bit slicker…easier to add tags and speaking of tags…
• Tags…Furled relied more on folders. Once you discover the power of tags, it just works better
• Subscriptions…different from RSS but equally as powerful. These subscriptions reside within del.icio.us and can quickly change depending on what you may be researching
• Private/Public…another feature furl had but still important. You may not want to share a particular resource for a variety of reasons. Anyone interested in my golf tags?

I could go on but won’t. It’s powerful. Check out Jeff Utecht’s screencast for detailed instructions.

Get yourself an account, then let me add you to my network…I’ll put you to work!

These are the future, my friends. They’re here and living among us. They’re not very interested in us, and I’m not sure I blame them. The best we can hope for is that one day they may keep us as pets.

This article via David Warlick via Ewan is dealing more with the irrelevance of today’s newspapers but substitute the word newspaper for school and editor to teacher and it’s pretty telling.

They buy music from the iTunes store - but continue to download tracks illicitly as well. They use BitTorrent to get US editions of Lost. They think ‘Google’ is a synonym for ‘research’ and regard it as quite normal to maintain and read blogs (55 million as of last night), use Skype to talk to their mates and upload photos to Flickr. Some even write entries on Wikipedia. And they know how to use iMovie or Adobe Premiere to edit videos and upload them to YouTube.

Now look round the average British newsroom (staff room). How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors (teachers) have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors (teachers) have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)

Looks like Prensky material. We’ve got a long way to go. It’s noteworthy that the business world, the traditional newspaper is realizing that they are missing a critical demographic. But for them, it’s only one demographic. For us, it’s our only demographic.