Joe Ugoretz has a provocative piece out in Innovate regarding the importance of letting students start worthwhile tangents in online class discussions. (Registration required.) It would be easy to flatten his argument into a “guide on the side” bromide, but I think Joe provides both more meat and more subtlety than that. (more…)
Author: Michael Feldstein
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Technorati to Provide Folksonomy Tuning
According to David Weinberger, Technorati is about to add a folksonomy tuning feature that shows related tags, making closely related content more findable. This is the kind of thing we need to make folksonomies be useful as more than just fun toys.
Mix in a faceted results tuner like fac.etio.us and you’ve got something really cool.
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Catching Up on the Backblog
Work has been keeping me so busy lately that the list of postable items has been piling up on my virtual desk. I’m going to try to do some catching up over the next week.
Let me start by calling your attention to Eric Feinblatt’s new blog. Eric is a new friend, colleague, and co-conspirator at SUNY. (He works with Beth Harris at FIT.) Eric and I are working on a project that we’ll be able to talk about more publicly Real Soon Now.
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Faceted Folksonomies
I’ve been meaning to blog about fac.etio.us but Alan beat me to it. Basically, facetious allows you to create what amounts to a pivot table out of folksonomy-tagged web pages.
This is a better solution than creating faceted single tags (e.g., “arthistory:france”) that I made a while back because (a) it’s simpler, and (b) it doesn’t require any sort of mechanism for agreeing on a taxonomy of facets. If you want to search Flickr for French art and not get a billion pictures of family vacations in France, you can search for the “France” tag and pivot on the “art” tag, while I was there I found some coolers and these are good camping coolers perfect for summer. (more…)
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Interesting Interview with Flickr CEO
O’Reilly Netowrk‘s Richard Korman has a fascinating interview with Flickr’s CEO Stewart Butterfield. (Love that name, by the way.) There’s lots of good stuff here about what makes Flickr work as social software and how people are using it. Here’s what Butterfield has to say, for example, about folksonomies: (more…)
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cogdogblog: Chemistry Students Building Delicious Link Collections
Alan Levine has posted an account of how a chemistry teacher is using del.icio.us tags to have her students gather related resources for her chemistry class.
This is directly relevant to a recent conversation here on e-Literate.
Good stuff.
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Upgraded to Expression Engine 1.2.1
I have upgraded the site to Expression Engine 1.2.1, which should fix the feed updating problem with Bloglines (which, by the way, still sucks).
As a bonus, I can now use the a desktop blogging application for authoring posts. I am writing this, for example, using MarsEdit, which I highly recommend. It’s very intuitive.