About Social Bookmarking

Check out the social bookmarks for the conference. Also see the bookmarks listed on the lower right side of the blog.

What is a social bookmark?
Social bookmarks are publicly sharable URL bookmarks or favorites. What's so great about that?

At a basic level, they are convenient. If you save your bookmarks on a server instead of your browser you can access them anywhere. But that's just scratching the surface. And it is not social.

The power of social bookmarks comes in the sharing and filtering of bookmarks. First the sharing:

Say you are a maven in some area of practice or interest. You rapidly find and consume knowledge online and you have a keen sense for quality resources. How can you easily share this expertise with your colleagues or students? If you create a social bookmark account at del.icio.us, Furl, Blinklist or similar site, you can share your links with others by giving them the URL and/or integrating a list of links into your web page or blog. Social bookmarking sites provide you with cut and paste code to make it easy. You can also subscribe to other's bookmarks through RSS newsreaders.

You can also filter and manage knowledge by tagging your bookmarks or by searching for bookmarks with particular tags. Tags are a form of metadata, a word or short phrase that describes the content of a link. You choose how to tag your links. (This is called folksonomy as opposed to taxonomy. See Ulises Ali Mejias thorough exploration.) You can subscribe to and publish bookmarks with selected tags. When we do this, we take advantage of our and others' considered attention. In a world of exploding knowledge production, tagged bookmarks help us refine our search. In fact, we do not have to search, others do it for us.

Still with me? Now here comes the fun part. We have set up an account at Del.icio.us for this conference. To log in, use the username "odcecon" and the password "odcecon06." Check out the help page for adding buttons or bookmarklets to your browser that will allow you to easily bookmark and tag a site. Now, as you come across web sites relevant to our conversations, tag it! Share the wealth!

If you already have a delicious account, you can tag links with the tag "for:ODCECon" and they will be added to the "for" area of the ODCECon account. Anyone who is logged in can transfer the link to the main list.

Go ahead, bookmark it! Help build the required reading list for online learning in Ohio!

Technorati Tags: ODCE

A Wiki is not a character in Star Wars

Check out the conference wiki at: The focus of the wiki is filling in the details of the question you were asked when you registered:

Imagine it is the year 2010. Ohio has become an outstanding model for the nation in creativity, collaboration, and emerging knowledge in the area of e-learning. What open doors made this possible?

You will notice the wiki update box in the upper right of this blog. This is a live picture of what sections have recently been edited in the wiki. Click on a text link or the wiki logo to go to the wiki. Create an account to add and edit.

New to wikis?

A wiki is a web page that anyone with permission to edit can edit. It's name comes from a Hawaiian word meaning quick. And it is, indeed, quick and easy to create and edit a wiki. Here is a great video overview of wikis. Our wiki is a public wiki so anyone in the world can contribute to it.

Wikis are a form of social software. They create an online space for collaboration and co-creation. One author makes a submission, then another adds to it. Subsequent authors may add to or edit what has been written. If someone does not like a change, it is possible to revert to previous version of the page. Many wikis provide a discussion page where disagreements over content can be hashed out. This is the process in place on the most well-known example of a wiki: Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that now has nearly a million entries in the English language version.

How else are wikis used? Well, I'd love to hear how attendees of this conference are using wikis. What are effective uses of wikis? What are key ingredients to making wikis work well? What are the limits and potential of this technology? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Could our wiki be a blueprint for progress here in Ohio? It will only be as valuable as the time and energy invested in it. So, please, try out the wiki!

Technorati Tags: ODCE

About this blog

Welcome to an experiment. A read/rite risk. A web 2.0 tinker.

Some of you may read blogs for education or entertainment. Your students may use blogs in courses you teach. You may use a blog for personal reflection, knowledge management or peer collaboration.

But have you ever blogged a conference? That is what we are trying out during ODCE 2006.

Blogs will certainly be part of our conversations during this conference as we consider the changes in pedagogy that the many tools for self-publishing and online networking allow.

Please consider making this blog your doorway to ongoing conversation about the ideas, issues and challenges we consider in the sessions, keynote addresses, and conversations with vendors and peers.

A team of volunteer bloggers will offer their reflections and provide discussion prompts throughout the conference. Take advantage of the comments section to offer your thoughts. If you have a blog, please trackback to our posts so we can track the conversation as it spreads through the web. Also include the technorati tag "ODCE" in your post to help us search Technorati for posts about the conference. (Here is the code: Technorati Tags: ODCE.)

Are you using blogs? What do you think of blogging the conference? How can we use online tools to deepen and extend our conversations? How can we use these tools to make Ohio the "outstanding model for the nation in creativity, collaboration, and emerging knowledge in the area of e-learning?" We can't wait to learn from you!

Technorati Tags: ODCE