I love del.icio.us! I use it a lot and think it could be way useful for just about anyone who uses the web. But if you have ever tried to convince a group of non-tech-nerds that it might help them out with their missions then you know the uphill battle I've faced. You not only have to cajole them into signing up for a del.icio.us account but you need to explain the concept of "social" bookmarking, teach them to tag, and then convince them that this will actually be more useful than just keeping their bookmarks on their local computer.
In steps The Common Craft Show. These folks are building a set of fun and quirky videos that do a marvelous job at explaining tech tools to the general population. This great example shows why teachers might want to use del.icio.us. I couldn't have said it better myself. No really I couldn't have.
Comments
Ellyssa Kroski has written an excellent article, The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging, which really helped me grasp how to find what I want on the web.
“We are on the cusp of an exciting new stage of Web growth in which the users provide both meaning and a means of finding through tagging.
The wisdom of crowds, the hive mind, and the collective intelligence are doing what heretofore only expert catalogers, information architects and website authors have done. They are categorizing and organizing the Internet and determining the user experience, and it’s working. No longer do the experts have the monopoly on this domain; in this new age users have been empowered to determine their own cataloging needs. Metadata is now in the realm of the Everyman.â€
Post new comment