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! :-)

[Skip Zilla]

What outstanding work you've done, Laura, to re-construct the Fireside Learning website! You've given us new opportunities to grow more adept in using digital media as we communicate with one another in this community of learners. For any of us who is challenged technically in using new digital tools and is looking for assistance, I highly recommend your Kaleidoscope: Online Learning Resources which you originally provided for your online university students.

BTW, Or-Tal's disaffection for Delicious--of which you, Laura, have made extensive use as a website designer in flexibly capturing and organizing external weblinks--because, in her judgment, it's less friendly than it might be for new users, is arguably more a matter of an inherently steeper learning curve to appreciate its usability and features. If others find difficulty or expensive effort in learning and using its capabilities, it might be useful to remember that the spreadsheet application just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and from its origination until the present day does require higher user engagement in learning its use than other productivity applications. (Remember how primitive the original 1-2-3 was? ;)

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Skip! The spreadsheet comparison is very interesting - we are all so used to it now, but I remember back in 1989 or so, when I was doing courses for my high school teaching certificate, we spent AGES in a Technology class learning how to use the old Lotus spreadsheet - and it just blew people's minds back then; the word "spreadsheet" didn't mean anything to anybody, although the application of it to keeping grade records was such a good one! Ha! I had not thought about that in a looooong time!

I should put in a plug here for something I really value about Delicious: they let you BACK UP all your data so you can keep a copy for yourself. While I am devoted to Delicious, I am afraid that when Yahoo goes away (as it just might!), Delicious will go away too (a word of warning to all you Flickr users out there, as well!) - so while I have invested some serious time in creating my onlinecourselady Delicious bookmarks, I have them all in a handy html file backup provided by Delicious so that I can still have all my work if/when Delicious is no longer an online service.

[Skip Zilla]

You are so correct, Laura, to caution us about preserving our productions in formats which will outlast the lives of the productivity applications we used to produce them.

About a decade ago, I was asked in a meeting with corporate managers/engineers at Pratt and Whitney in East Hartford, CT, how to preserve in electronic formats the "best practices" they had accumulated in their company's long history of engineering, building, and testing jet engines. (Much of their important corporate knowledge of how to accomplish their work existed only in the minds and in few documents of a wave of retiring engineers.) They were concerned not so much with losing as computing changes whatever of this knowledge was starting to be put into electronic formats, but especially with the future costs of managing electronic data in obsolete formats and of converting it into new formats over time as computing capabilities changed. I won't go into my lengthier answer (which got me started in developing a solution for them), but I can say that I immediately informed them that their hope for a permanently usable format which would spare them all costs of managing their body of knowledge through future changes in computing was unrealistic.

As the Web-based productivity apps come and go, even more rapidly than the desktop apps have, we need to be aware how to keep our valuable online productions viable. Of course, that's why we have knowledgeable professionals like you, Laura, with whom to consult and learn how to proceed with confidence.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Skip, I have faith in all the young geeky folks out there who we can always hire to CONVERT data formats, one into another, even if that exceeds my own programming skills. So, I know that HTML will not be around for forever... but it is a structured data format, documented, non-proprietary, so, if and when HTML does finally go away, it would not be a great cost to me to hire somebody to create a conversion program to turn all my HTML stuff into whatever the new standard will be.

Of course, because HTML is so widely used, I won't be alone, and I'll be able to benefit from the conversion programs other people create, probably without even having to hire a bright young kid to do it for me!

I got a sense of this when Unicode finally came around for Greek fonts. All the people who had used non-standard fonts to represent Greek were really in trouble - everybody needed a specialized convert-to-Unicode program for their own font! Some fonts were widely enough used that conversion programs were also widely available, but for people who had been using a really uncommon font, there was no hope for it - they either had to write their own conversion program, or hire someone to do it for them. I still meet people who are paralyzed when their publisher insists on having Greek inside a document be in Unicode when they are still using their old, proprietary, unshareable Greek fonts from ages ago. Since they don't understand about font standards, they don't really understand what Unicode is and why it is so great! And sometimes they have to retype all the Greek if no conversion program is available for the eccentric font they got in the habit of using.

[Laura Gibbs]

UPDATE: I went through the past several months of new members (about the last 100 or so new members) and tagged their websites and blogs. Such great stuff! I will keep on with that when I get some time later today but here's what's great: PLEASE JUST TAG YOURSELF! It's been a long time since the member link list was updated, so I know there is all kinds of create web content created by our members out there. If you tag it, it will become part of our virtual "Fireside Member Library" online.

I am really amazed at all the things I have seen so far just working through the member list. WOW.

[Ian Carmichael]

Hiya folks,

I've just been browsing the delicious links - it looks like (mostly) Skip, Laura and I have been having fun adding 'firesidelearning' links - anyone else want to chip in? It's easy!

I'll read yours, if you'll read mine!

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Ian, I'll confess that I have not been so good about tagging lately myself... just yesterday, I did a MASSIVE cleanup of my Aesop's fable tag collection (http://delicious.com/aesopus), and I need to start doing more of that again for Fireside... it's not that I'm saving things as local bookmarks - I'm just being lazy about saving the links. That's something where I wish there were some little nagging voice my computer that said, "Hey hey hey don't you want to save that before...???" :-)