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Glossary of 'Social Software' terms in education

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del.icio.us

Definition: Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. In the first instance you can use it to store your bookmarks or favourites, which can then be accessed from any internet connected computer. Imagine you are at home or at a conference, and you find a great site, add it to your del.icio.us links, when you get back to college you can access this link. Where del.icio.us enhances this simple process if the ability to “tag” your links with keywords. You can sort your links by tags and what makes this a Web 2.0 experience is the opportunity to see what other sites people have bookmarked and tagged with the same keyword. You can also search links by tags as well.

Use in Education: Can be used to aggregate links from students on various topics. RSS feeds from various tags can be fed into a VLE (such as Moodle). It is also possible to include your del.icio.us entries in your personalised Google homepage (or similar), so your bookmarks appear on your Google homepage - could be used by students as a way of organising their own useful links relevant to their studies!

del.icio.us provide easily downloadable link buttons for users to employ on their PC/Laptop. Therefore when you are on a really good site which you'd like to 'save'; you simply have to click the tag button and del.icio.us opens up and fills in most of the information you might require. When you want to re-access something simply click the del.icio.us button.

Link to Example: http://edtechtalk.com/ The "Ed Tech Weekly" podcast uses del.icio.us as an aggregator and link community for their weekly updates on educational technology. Using del.icio.us, tag for:edtechtalk to add a site to their attention stream for inclusion in the show.

Digg

Definition: Digg is a popular news and social networking site. I allows users to submit stories and then vote or Digg them. The more popular a story the more diggs. Digg has overtaken Slashdot in terms of popularity as a source of vibrant web news, but because it relies on the "wisdom of crowds", who in this case are often teenage boys, it can get a bit like a locker room.. smelly and full of testosterone. Slashdot remains a useful moderated news site for serious geeks. Digg also provides users the opportunity to comment on submitted stories, and whilst these comments can often deteriorate into flame wars, there are often very useful incidental links posted and discussions roped in. The podcast for Digg, is Diggnation, and is not really safe for work, due to the amount of profanity, and topics discussed... however it does remain an engaging insight into tech culture.

Use in Education: The vast number of stories covered means there are often items of interest to educators, These links are often posted to the champs list. The important thing is that the links are to things percieved as cool by the Digg audience, which can add a certain amount of QA in terms of street cred for a lecturer desperately trying to understand the minds of their students.

Link to Example: An example link from www.digg.com..was time a set of Flash animated Leonardo Da Vinci drawings... part of a V&A exhibition http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1384_leonardo/animated_illustrations  

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