Delicious Fireside

[Laura Gibbs]

This is a place for us to explore different uses for Delicious here at Fireside. As visitors to the Fireside homepage will notice, I've replaced the long list of static links that appeared on the homepage previously - now you see a list of links to Fireside categories along with a feed of the items mostly recently tagged with "firesidelearning."

Here's the idea: we can ALL contribute to that list of links, keeping it fresh and up to date, by tagging things with "firesidelearning." There are tons of cool websites that Skip has been tagging with "firesidelearning" - full of good information, interesting, eclectic. Add your eclectic interests to the list!

In particular we can keep track of Fireside members and their web publications by using these tags:
"firesidelearning member blog" (please feel free to tag individual blog posts, too!)
"firesidelearning member website" (please feel free to tag individual pages in the site, too!)
"firesidelearning member wiki" (ditto)
"firesidelearning member ning" (many Fireside Ning members have started other Nings!)

Also, you can tag your students' blogs, wikis and other projects:
"firesidelearning member student"

Right now, I've grabbed all the links that were previously on the front page and tagged them in this way. That link list was pretty old, so I will use a little utility to clean out the dead links soon.

Meanwhile, help us UPDATE THE LIST! Are you a Fireside member with a blog or a wiki or a website or a Ning you want to publicize? Student projects you want to share? An excellent blog post your recently wrote? TAG IT - and it will be AUTOMATICALLY added to the list.

Here are some instructions I share with my students on Getting Started with Delicious.

I've got lots more to add here - but I wanted to put some notes to get started. I'll be back on Sunday with a very nifty "randomizer" that will let you "roll the dice," so to speak and randomly visit websites we have tagged in this way! Meanwhile - have fun!!!

People might also want to be volunteer "librarians" to develop some additional use of tags... for right now, I have just stuck to what was previously listed as static information on the homepage - which was a LOT of stuff, very valuable - and now it is easily accessible... and easy to update, too!

Ideas? Questions??? I'll be back again on Sunday... but I wanted to at least get a discussion space available for anyone curious about what happened to the front page. I hope we can do some good colalborative work with Delicious as our shared link space! :-)

[Ian Carmichael]

Fantastic, Laura,

Such a liberating tool (I think - I'm just getting personally familiar with the power of delicious!)

Wonderful work.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Ian, I found a totally cool trick with a parameter called random - I'm going to build our little "roll the dice" now! The power of this thing is unlimited... it makes me wish I were a computer programmer...! These are really different tools for adding human intelligence to the mass of information on the Internet. So exciting! :-)

[Or-Tal Kiriati]

At the risk of disappointing... I must confess that I really really dislike delicious.
It is an unfriendly application for the individual user.
I just went back there, to see if I can update my bookmarks (last saved some good years ago) only to discover that nothing had changed. It didn't become friendlier. The amount of time required to use it is out of proportion. Plus, you need to have a minimal tech understanding to be able to export-import. Looking around at technical developments I would have expected them to have an automatic synchronization by now.

So I know I am not going to use it. And I think perhaps we could offer an alternative by opening a page for recommended links, where everybody can post links at they find them. We can categorize them too. What do you think?

[Laura Gibbs]

Please feel free to create a wiki, Or-Tal - perhaps you will find people have time and motivation to post things there! I know I do not have time for that, but perhaps others do. A wiki does give you the option to have everybody add links; like Delicious, wikis are collaborative tools, which is what you need here to maintain a link list that everybody contributes too. Still, I doubt you will find that people are motivated to spend time adding lists of links to a wiki, but perhaps I am wrong about that.

Meanwhile, I am going to go tag all the websites of new members who have joined since Skip and Connie created the old list. It will take me about ten minutes to do that, as opposed to a couple hours trying to wrestle with a static link list.

I'm sorry you don't find Delicious friendly. I love it, my students love it - if you have a specific question about Delicious, I'll be glad to answer it. It's been a lifesaver for me in finally being able to organize thousands of websites that I find useful online (online books, student projects) - I would never be able to organize thousands of links in a static list.

[Or-Tal Kiriati]

Well, I will... when I have the time.
What do you mean by wiki? Is there a wiki feature to the ning network?

[Maria Fleyshgakker]

Here, check it out Wikispaces in a simple way, i think, wiki allows everyone to create their webpages and if you don't have another way to get your own site you will have to spend some time learning where to click, but if you already have a webpage I am not sure you would need wiki.
Hey people, correct me if i am wrong, i need to know if i understand it right.

[Laura Gibbs]

There are LOTS of great wiki software options out there - my personal favorite is PBWiki for Educators. Here's one wiki I have created with PBWiki (I have several and like it very much):
Comenius: Lexicon atriale latino-latinum - this is my most active wiki, a true international collaboration! I am so proud of what we are doing here, although it is an admittedly eccentric project. :-)

I've got a note here about how I use wikis and blogs and Nings in conjunction with one another.

(Maria, I just tagged your GooglePages website this morning so that it is on the list - super!)

[Maria Fleyshgakker]

Thank you Laura, I don't think I would be able to do that myself :)
This is the first time I learn about Delicious :)

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Maria, these tools are really not so bad! I love the name PBWiki - it stands for Peanut Butter Wiki and the reason that they gave it this name is that it is as easy to make one of their wikis as it is to make a peanut butter sandwich!

Maybe it is no coincidence that Peanut Butter and Delicious are both metaphors from the world of food.

And luckily for me blogs and wikis and all of that are not fattening, ha ha ha. I've got too much fattening fun stuff to tempt me already... like real peanut butter!!!

[Laura Gibbs]

Ha ha, I had to laugh here at my 10 minutes' time estimate... I didn't realize how many members there were to look at... and how fascinating their web stuff would be!!! Anyway, I went through four pages of the newest members, and will keep on with that later. Meanwhile, I hope everybody will start tagging themselves and the online content they have created! :-)

[Leigh Newton]

I am also a big fan of Delicious and have been evangelical in my spreading of its ability amongst other teachers, particularly as I can code sites for the Units of Inquiry that we do in our PYP school (part of the IB) and they will easily be accessible next year and the year after for the new teachers that come through our international school.

However, I was then introduced to Diigo and have found that to be a more powerful experience as it adds much much more than just bookmarking. I found this blog that compares the two online bookmarking services. The comparison doesn't deal with it all however. It mentions that Diigo allows you to highlight words and lines throughout an article but I add that it then allows you to share those highlights in a group that you've joined. Groups can be created in various ways.

I'm thinking that in ten years Delicious will have expired as other online bookmarking sites will have drained its support. I haven't worked out how to import Delicious bookmarks into Diigo however.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Leigh, I tried several different bookmarking services (Diigo and Magnolia in particular) before settling on Delicious - and the main reason for me is the simplicity of the URLs and the way that it makes use of RSS. I don't really use Delicious to bookmark things for my own purposes, but rather in order to organize them and share them with others via very simple Delicious URLs or, even better, through RSS, again in as simple a way as possible.

What's great about services like Delicious and Diigo is that they meet so many different kinds of needs... it's definitely important for people to figure out what their own needs are when choosing a social bookmarking service... a web publishing service ... etc. etc. One thing I like about Delicious is that it makes it easy for me to export all my bookmarks and save a backup copy, which I do on a regular basis, just to make sure I am ready to move on to another service when the time comes.

I'm surprised Diigo doesn't have an import service. Magnolia, which is also a really nice bookmarking service, has a Delicious import utility that works really well ... I almost jumped ship and went to Magnolia two years ago... but Delicious lured me back, thank goodness, since Magnolia seems to have run on hard times - I just went to take a look at them to see what was new over there, and they are totally offline at the moment due to some kind of Jan. 30 data failure - OUCH. That's exactly why I am superstitious about backing up my bookmarks...

:-)