Be yourself – stand out with edutagger

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Remember when Del.ici.ous and other social bookmarking sites were new….. and hardly anybody knew what they were let alone used them? Remember when we discovered Digg?

Well here’s your chance to see something else new with great potential, which is designed specially for K-12 teachers. Edutagger is in its early days (not much there yet) so will depend on us, the online educators of the world, to build up its capacity to store and promote the best resources we can find and share with each other. Think Delicious tagging + Digg and you’ll have an understanding of what it might do.

Blending the use of categories and tags, Edutagger it is an online organisational space for sharing and pooling our resources. Could this be the breakthrough that we have all been looking for?

I recommend that you take a look, create an account, and add some links. Before you know it we could build a critically useful collection for us all.

Edutagger still sports Google ads – like other online tools before it, Edutagger relies on this to get started. Don’t let that stop you exploring and contributing to Edutagger.

For me the other great thing is that this product is made by an aussie, who works in one of our schools in Melbourne, Australia. Email chatting with Edutagger’s creator today I discovered that he was a wee bit busy preparing a video presentation for parents! Nice touch..someone who ‘gets’ education!

Our busy life never stops does it? So let’s share the load and ‘be happy’!

Photo: Be yourself

Update: Information provided by email by Mark Schuman, from his school in Melbourne. Mark supports and trains staff in the use of e-Learning technologies and has become known as “Mr Moodle” – his name is around the Moodle forums a fair bit. Thanks to Stephen Downes for ‘picking me up’ on not providing information about Mark (blame late-night blogging!). Stephen provides a profile and some comments about the tool.

12 thoughts on “Be yourself – stand out with edutagger”

  2. Pingback: 網絡集錦 « Alan Poon’s Blog

  4. Mark, thanks for responding to Michael’s suggestions. Michael is one of my favourite teachers for looking at connections and ways of making web tools work..so I’m glad you two are bouncing ideas around on this 🙂

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  5. I now have a del.icio.us sync process in operation… to an extent. There is a new category “Del.icio.us” that generates links from del.icio.us that are tagged with “edutagger”. At this stage, it’s difficult to sync the tags themselves, so those are blank for now. However, given that everybody tags things differently, it’s probably not so bad.

    At this stage the sync processes twice-a-day, and links are posted by the user “del.icio.us”. If anybody is interested in trying it out, please ad the “edutagger” tag to your next del.icio.us link (obviously K-12 related) and we’ll see how it progresses. I’m not 100% happy with it for the moment, and I have some concerns on its continual use in the future, but i’ll wait and see if my concerns are warranted.

    Thanks again for the ideas, i’ll work on the others when possible. Again, feedback is most welcome 🙂

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  6. Hi Michael,

    The del.icio.us sync could happen in a couple of ways. The first is some kind of export of del.icio.us bookmarks, then an import into Edutagger, which would be a manual process required by users. The advantage here is that users have better control of the categorisation, etc. Of course, it’s not a true sync and may not be ideal.

    The second option (and I think this is what you’re suggesting), is a live sync between del.icio.us links specifically tagged with “edutagger” and Edutagger itself. This would work by Edutagger scanning del.icio.us for links tagged with “edutagger” through an RSS feed, and submit those as some pre-defined user. The issue with this is that it won’t be able to sync to your Edutagger account, so you’d still have to “edutag” those links even after they’ve been added. The other issue is that the categorisation of links would not be possible, so they would all end up in some pre-defined category. Finally, from a development point of view, del.icio.us separates its tags by spaces, as opposed to Edutagger which does so by commas, so i’ll have to look into how easy that would be to implement.

    I had a brief look at the Mycroft Project Page, and it doesn’t seem too difficult to implement, so i’ll get started on that as soon as I have some spare time.

    Thanks again for your feedback Michael, i’d be interested in your thoughts on the sync process with del.icio.us. I guess both would be possible but i’m guessing the second option is what you’re looking for. Do the issues raised provide any significant drawbacks from your perspective? I’d be interested in others’ opinions on this concept as well.

    Judy, I hope you don’t mind this use of your blog to host this discussion 🙂

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  7. Hi Judy, Mark and everyone,

    This is a fantastic website – and I have to say the sink/swim clincher for me is how quickly we can see some kind of syncing up with del.icio.us (eg. I have an ‘edutagger’ tag in delicious which automatically syncs). Having said that, the bookmarklet works well enough for the time being.

    Could we have, fairly soon though, a search engine plug-in for firefox available on the mycroft project page (don’t think it is currently)? This would be another way of removing unnecessary ‘layers’ of access that might otherwise disuade savvy users.

    Cheers and many thanks,

    M

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  9. Hi all,

    First of all, thanks for the link and for the comments provided so far, I really appreciate this kind of feedback.

    To answer a couple of questions and concerns, a one-screen tagging system is possible and i’ll work on getting something like that implemented soon. There are difficulties associated with this through the way it automatically generates title text, but it’s still possible.

    Importing links from del.icio.us is also a great idea, i’ll look further into this, it’s probably not very difficult.

    As for a shortcut or toolbar button (sometimes known as a Bookmarklet), that’s already available but perhaps not as obvious as it should be. If you open up your “Profile” page, you’ll see a link to the Bookmarklet at the bottom. Simply add that link to your favourites or (if in Firefox) drag it to your bookmark toolbar, and whenever you’re on a page you find interesting, click on the link to “edutag” it 🙂

    You don’t necessarily have to contribute new links to be involved, one of the best things to do is to click on the “tag” link next to anything you find interesting. This is very simple and doesn’t require any extra steps, and it’s surprisingly satisfying 🙂 That will allow a natural promotion of more popular links and help others find better quality content in less time. Be sure to check out the “New Links” section (accessible via the tab on the top of the front page) to see what upcoming content is available that hasn’t yet made the front page.

    Thanks again for your feedback, i’d love to hear more, either here or through the contact form on edutagger.

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  10. You’ve made a good point Penny…edutagger doesn’t replace delicious in my mind either. What I like is the possibility of sharing across K-12 – and for that to be efficient for me I would want to have a toolbar button to “ed-it” a bit like the ‘digg it’ button that works for Digg.

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  11. Don’t you think there’s a few too many steps involved when tagging something for edutagger? del.icio.us works for me because it doesn’t take much effort. That said, I recently spent a couple of hours going through all of my links and giving them better descriptions and tags, a bit of a “spring clean”!!

    If there was a) one-screen tagging system and b) a way of importing my edu links from del.ico.us I’d probably contribute to edutagger a lot. As it is, I think I’ll be a user, not a contributer.

    But we’ll see 🙂

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