Tagging Variations

Today I was supposed to get stuck right back into planning for Term 1, but alas, I was found to be procrastinating. Not entirely a waste of time though as it saw me doing something I’ve been planning to do for ages – tidying up the tags I use for bookmarking sites in Diigo. The reason I wanted to do this was because I had several tags for the one thing, for example: socialnetworking and social_networking and ‘social networking.’ I know, I could tag each site that I wanted to use this tag on three different ways, but I really am in favour of keeping things as simple as possible and so wanted to use just one version. Which one though? Does it matter?I actually like the social_networking version best because it separates the words making them easier to read but keeps the whole phrase clearly together. But, I didn’t choose to go with that version because after looking around a bit at what other people were doing, most people use the version without spaces – socialnetworking.

On the edit tags page on Diigo it tells me how many times I’ve used a particular tag as well as telling me how many times that tag has been used throughout Diigo. For example, you can see here that I have used the tag google_earth 6 times, but it has been used throughout the Diigo community 1251 times to tag different websites.

If I change that tag to googleearth as one word then let’s see what happens:

Ah! Now I see this variation has been used 4378 times throughout the community.

So, what’s the moral of the story? For me, it’s a few points:

There are a few different tagging variations used
Most people tag by not putting spaces between the words
It doesn’t matter which variation I use, so I’ll stick with one to keep things simple for myself
When searching by using tags it’s important to make sure I try a few variations of the tag to maximse search results.

Here are a few questions I’ve had about tagging for a while:

When we tag things should we think that we tagging for ourselves to find it later, or for others? Of course we are doing both in reality and tagging things so others can find them is the social part of ’social bookmarking’!
How should this effect the tags we use, as in the number of tags per bookmark, or the detail? Does it matter? Advice I’ve read in the past says to use as many tags as possible per bookmark/item. I guess that makes sense as giving something a tag in effect puts it into a ‘folder’ of other items with that tag. People will look in different ‘folders’ for the same thing, so as many tags as a practicable makes sense.
Should we use variations of the same tag on each bookmark?
Does anyone have a system they use when tagging? For example, do you use words from the title, then words from the first paragraph, and then look at the overall article?

Tagging is something I have found confusing in the past and a while to get used to so if you’ve got some great advice, I’d love to hear it!

Wordle Wordle Wordle

Wordle.net is a great little website that lets you put in any words you like and it displays them in a great looking wordcloud. Here is my first wordle:

You can either put in your own words, or you ask Wordle to use the tags in your del.icio.us account, which is what I did here.

Wordle would be a great way of getting students to present ideas on anything really – in any language! Reflecting on someone else’s Wordle using the target language could be a great class activity.

Delicious and Skype – Getting Social Online!

I sent this email out to my technoLOTE email discussion group, but thought I should probably post it here as well.
Here we go:

Del.icio.us

Delicious is a social bookmarking service. Rather than saving your favourites in your browser and only being able to access them on the one computer, you save them to an online account. The social part comes in when you add other people’s accounts to your network. The great thing about Delicious is that you can see who is bookmarking the same sites as you, and so then you can check out their links and find even more great resources.You can see my delicious account by going to: http://deli.cio.us.technolote. Another delicious account to note is this one: http://del.icio.us/other_than_english Have a look at these sites to get a feel for what deli.icio.us is and what it does.

Check out this post on technoLOTE called ‘Social Bookmarking – Simply Delicious’ where I have written about exactly what Delicious is and why you would use it. There is also a short video there called ‘Social Bookmarking in Plain English’ which gives a fantastic explanation. At the bottom of the post there are links to video tutorials about how to set up a Delicious account.

Skype

Skype official website – free download and free calls and internet calls via kwout

Skype is a program you download to your computer (it’s free!), create an account, find other people who have skype, add them as contacts and then you can make free phone calls to them. You can also send chat messages. It’s much like MSN, only better. My fabulous colleague, Anne Mirtschin, has written a blog post about why she loves skype. Click here to read what she has to say. Here is a list of things you need to know about Skype that Anne wrote:

Here are 10 facts you may need to know:-

Skype is VOIP (voice over internet protocol) and its use is free if it is calls are made computer to computer.
Equipment: skype software (download from www.skype.com) , headset with microphone, or desktop mic, a webcamera (for videoconferencing if you want to, but not essential), IWB or datashow for projecting the video (if for classroom use not needed for personal computer use of course!), user names (equivalent of phone numbers) of contact people
User friendly, quick loading (sometimes falls over but getting more reliable all the time)
Neat search facility to add other users to contact list
Chat or audio can take place. It is polite to send a request message via chat first, to ensure that person you are contacting is not in class or otherwise engaged. (My laptop has embarrassed me on several occasions by ringing, in class)
Conference calls: both audio and chat. Currently, videoconferencing can only be used between two users. The video aspect cuts out after a third person enters the conversation.
Chats can be saved with appropriate title, by bookmarking. Goto chats>bookmarked chats and enter a title whilst in skype conversation) or goto recent chats and it tends to save automatically, but with a non categorised title.
Can buy credit to ring landlines locally, domestically, overseas (extremely cheap overseas calls)
Constantly requesting feedback as to quality of calls, and working on improving the service. (Sometimes line quality is not high, delays but these are getting less over time.)
Number of users is restricted to, I think, 10 and then a bridge phone number must be given.

Hint: If using it for the first time, experiment with a friend or colleague after work hours, to ensure you know how it works before trying it in a 3way (or more) chat or videoconference setting.

My Skype username is jess.meyer – add me to your list and I’m happy to have a chat with you to test out your new toy! Skype is a great way of collaborating and staying in touch really quickly and easily. Skype me soon!

Social Bookmarking – Simply Del.icio.us!

1. What is it?

Social bookmarking simply means saving links to your favourite websites online and then sharing those links with others. The most common way of doing this is by using a free service called del.icio.us.

Here is a video from Common Craft that shows you exactly what social bookmarking with del.icio.us means!

2. Why would I use it?You need the name of a website, but it’s in your favourites list on your PC or laptop, which you don’t have access to at the moment…

You’ve sent an email to your students with a bunch of cool websites in it you want them to check out, except half of them didn’t receive it and the other half didn’t read it…

You’ve printed out a list of websites for your students, but they’ve lost the page and never bring it to class anyway…

Thankfully you’ve bookmarked all these useful sites online and they just have to jump on the internet at school or at home – no excuses!

10 reasons to use del.icio.us (from ‘Simply Delicious’ Online Social Bookmarking or: Tagging for Teaching, David Muir, EdCompBlog)

1.Save sites that you find when you are on different computers to one, central place.

2. Access your bookmarks from anywhere you have access to the internet

3. Continue to access your bookmarks even when your computer crashes or you get a new computer.

4. Share websites with your students or peers

5. Search your bookmarks with keywords or ‘tags.’

6. Use related tags to extend or narrow your searches

7. Display your saved website links by category

8. Learn about new sites from other del.icio.us users who have similar interests to you

9. Subscribe to others’ del.icio.us bookmarks

10. Check out recently posted and popular sites

Here is another excerpt from the essay mentioned above about what del.icio.us can do and how you can use it in your classes:

Deli.icio.us?

It is possible to use del.icio.us simply as a site for saving your favourites/bookmarks online but it is more than that. It is your personal website where you can store and categorise your bookmarks. You can use it for recipes, gift lists, travel sites and more. You can also learn what websites others find interesting. Del.icio.us allows you to save a link to anything you view on the web. You can also use it to share what you read on the web with other teachers or your students.

It has many educational possibilities (as listed by David Muir of EdCompBlog):

1. Collection of websites for student research or projects

2. Book recommendations

3. Professional research

4. List of books you would like to read or like your students to read

5. Placing weblinks on your school webpage

6. Students can find resources at home and access them at school or vice versa

7. Share what you are reading or view what your peers are reading on the web

8. Web site collections tagged by school topic

3. Ok, that’s all well and good, but how do I do it?To find out how to set up a del.icio.us account, you can go to the Tech Ease website for a series of short videos on each stage of the del.icio.us process. They are small files you simply click on them, wait a bit for it to download, and watch.