Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Social Bookmarking - eh?

OK so you may have heard of this already. However, although I have heard it "bandied about" as they say in Yorkshire, I've never really understood what it meant....its a bit like the term WEB 2.0 everyone seems to talk about it but no-one admits to not really knowing what it means....watch this space for that one. So social bookmarking and Del.icio.us let us explore what it can do for us at elearn2work.

Social bookmarking is a way of sharing knowledge and information that could be useful for everyone who likes the things we like. The idea is that you use del.icio.us to bookmark pages of interest to you, then you "tag" them, ie give them key word descriptions that allow other people to find them. The beauty is that del.icio.us stores your bookmarks for you so that you can access them anywhere. This becomes really useful when you have a group of like-minded people, a bit like us at el2w, that are all interested in the same sort of info. Lets get down to the nitty gritty: We are all interested in all things elearning right? So we log into http://del.icio.us/elearn2work using the login: elearn2work and password: el2wsa then we can set our browser up with the del.icio.us button(they show you how when you first log in) Now any time you come across an article, journal or site to do with the project or elearning you can click the del.icio.us button and it will be saved. Pretty soon we should have a pool of elearning links and bookmarks.
Why not set up a del.icio.us account for your organisation? Get your staff to add any bookmarks that are pertinent to your area of interest...a great tool for informal learning and collaboration.
To make things easy I have put a link to del.icio.us in the side bar.

PebblePad e-portfolio tool

Went to a demonstration of this tool at the Educa online conference in Berlin last week.



I was very impressed with this tool; particularly useful for capturing informal learning by the learner. pebblePad is a learner-centred fully portable e-portfolio tool for life that is very easy to set up and use.
Once an account is created, any number of assets such as achievements, targets, experiences can be logged by the user. The learner can create a web page with links to particular achievements and experiences. Anything that is recorded or uploaded into pebblePad can be shared with named people. These people can be given different levels of access to the assets within the e-portfolio.
Coming soon is a new interface that will appeal more to younger learners and get them engaged in learning how to organise their lives online.


If you attended the online educa conference in Berlin this year, view and contribute to the webfolio created in pebblepad