ECETECH

Collaboration/Communication. A

Because tagging is a very personal procedure14, many users don’t know how to designate sites, which leads to different styles of bookmarking the Web15. Javier Cañadas (2006) suggests four styles of tagging for del.icio.us users:

The selfish style. We tag only according to our individual context. Our tags have personal meaning (only for our own benefit), are irrelevant to other users and difficult to place in the social context of the del.icio.us network of users (for example, Oliver, for Tiya, etc. are tags which indicate resources saved for my husband or for my daughter). In time, it is possible that this type of user will classify content under generally accepted, more theme-oriented tags. This doesn’t exclude selfishness, but attributes a certain social utility to tags. The social benefit of such a classification consists in the user’s maturity.

Subscribing to Blogs For those not already familiar with this … there are two common ways to do this – some blogs allow users to subscribe by simply entering their email address (and then confirming the validating email sent to them). The more common technique for subscribing to a blog is to subscribe to an RSS Feed. An RSS Feed directs the blog, or a summary and link to it, to a special place where you can go and view it (as opposed to having it go to your crowded email In Box).

Some suggested sites where you can create your Education-specific Blog There are many websites on the Internet where educators can write their own blogs. One way to do this is to become part of an organization that provides its members a place to blog, such as Educause, or Classroom 2.0. The other way to write your own blog is to set yourself up on one of the many sites that are designed to allow you to create your own domain or subdomain, where the content is entirely yours. While this may sound a little daunting to newbies, it really isn’t too hard to get started. Below I have listed two such sites, both of which are free, and are very widely used.