Do I surf the web enough for social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking can be an essential tool in areas like research or tracking online resources not only for students but in all areas of academia. CiteULike seems a great resource. A quick search on my senior thesis topic brought up a ton of great and interesting stuff.

However, I have to admit I'm not completely sold on social bookmarking. The idea is great, being free from your desktop browsers so you can have access to your bookmarks wherever you are. But, for me, it doesn't seem to seemlessly integrate with other web 2.0 applications the way you can say post to your blog from google documents or even your mobile phone. Just another list of something you have to keep up.

Taging and bundling seem to be the best feature of Del.icio.us. I have used tags very sucessfully in gmail for keeping track of personal and consulting projects. It's like folders only better because one item can have multiple tags for cross referencing instead of having several copies runing around in different folders.

Have signed up for a Del.icio.us accounts so we'll see how it goes. In time I could be taking it all back.

Wiki's

It seems there are a great many application opportunites for a wiki within the college community, both for our own internal information needs and well as externally for student involvement. Couldn't the college's intranet be reconceived as a wiki. This would decentralize content and allow more people to take ownership of the information we need administratively to run the college. I couldn't even tell you whose runing the intranet now or how to update information.

A college wiki that was recommened at a recent conference was Willipedia, the wiki for Williams College in Massachusetts. Although it's listed as an independence source clearly the college has some administrative control over it as only faculty, staff and current students have edit access. Incidently, wiki's (and blogs, facebook etc) was a hot topic at an annual giving conference I attended last week. So take heart that all fields are trying to figure out how to navigate web 2.0.

ps...yes I am combining last weeks picture assignment with this weeks wiki entry. I didn't really have time to play around with that one until today and I'm too much of a nerd not to complete an assignment.

Thing 14

I enjoyed exploring more of the online productivity tools and came across something I'd been contemplating for some time but never committed to. Inbox Zero is the idea that you keep you email inbox at zero (or as much as possible) every day. Final action was also spurred by Jon from IT commenting on the size of my inbox. I haven't completely gone through all my old emails but I have set up several filters for listservs and e-newsletters that I get on a daily basis. Now I can go to the folder with these emails when I have time to read them instead of having to shift through them every morning to get to my "real" emails. Next I'm searching for an online tool for to do lists/ideas to help keep me organized with work and other outside projects.

PS...did anybody else see on the PostSecret comment that Wheaton College began their own PostSecret project? Interesting idea

Online productivity with google docs

I already had experience with goggle docs so I played around with zoho.  As we think about going green campus-wide web-based applications like google docs are a great way to save paper and time shuffling paper around. There are still some drawbacks in comparison to MS Word like formatting but the technology is only going to get better. Internally IA creates a lot of documents that need to be edited and reviewed by multiple people and google docs would make that significantly easier. In one example of something I'm working on today gift acknowledgement letters go through several rounds of edits and back and forth between myself and Eddie our database manager who produces them and using google docs would certainly save us time trying to figure out which was the most recent version. 

 

In the classroom applications like this are a great tool to teach students to work collaboratively as well as teach them skills they will need in their future jobs. There's greater flexibility as well with students being able to work on projects from their computers in their dorm or in a computer lab on campus. Theoretically giving them no excuse not to get there work done.

RSS and Blogs

I already had google reader set up for personal use so I took this opportunity to not only organize what I already had but to also add in the areas of philanthropy, advancement and education by both going to sites I usually frequent and doing a blog search. I was disappointed to learn there wasn't much out there on philanthropy and the only resource the Chronicle of Philanthropy (the advancement equivalent to the chron. of higher ed.) had available was a daily e-newsletter with a round up of various stories on the topic. The applications for Marymount to use rss to communicate with our local neighborhood, alumni, students, parents and even donors are unexplored and I hope our new website will support this function.

Blogs and rss are also a great tool in education not only to impart information but as a resource for ongoing learning. Imagine having a class blog to go to even after your class has ended or your textbook is out of print. As an art history major in college I particularly enjoyed discovering smarthistory.org and would have found it a great resource during my own studies.

This morning when I logged on to google my favorite blog post was Some Students Swear off Facebook for Lent from the Wired Campus on the Chronicle of Higher Education site. We'll have to ask Father Mark and Nassif if they approve.