Week 2 - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals

Now that Week 3 is almost over, I should probably post my Week 2 summary! Oops!

The focus of this weeks Work Literacy - Web 2.0 for Learning Professionals course was on Social Bookmarking--Delicious and Diigo. I had already been using Delicious for a while, but upon discovering Diigo I've decided to switch. Actually, I'm still using both, but I'm focusing on using Diigo for my professional bookmarks and Delicious for all of my bookmarks, including the personal ones... I think. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the best use of both of them. All I've done so far is bookmark (with tags) all websites/blogs/tools that I find interesting or that might be useful in my research of Web 2.0 tools for work. This should make it easier for me to find them again later.

Diigo has more of a community feel to me, but Delicious is still the more popular and "accepted" site as far as I can tell. However, Diigo does have some features that I like that aren't available on Delicious, primarily highlighting and commenting on bookmarked pages. I also like that I can set up my Diigo bookmarks to feed automatically into Delicious, so I really only have to bookmark pages once (both public and private) in Diigo and they show up on both sites.

For the class, people were tagging their bookmarks with wlning on Delicious. Check out the list here: http://delicious.com/tag/wlning.

Tagging bookmarks certainly has a use in training. For example, if I was teaching people about blogging I could create a special tag for the class such as AmFamBlogging, and any time someone found an interesting article on blogging they could bookmark it and tag it appropriately, basically sharing their knowledge with others who attended the class and who might attend the class in the future. This could also be useful for bookmarking competitor or industry information to be shared with others in the company.

Another use might be to use the "network" feature on Delicious in order to view the tags of an "expert" in a field. As an example, if you thought I was an expert on Web 2.0, you could see everything I've tagged web2.0 on Delicious here: http://delicious.com/collin.k/web2.0. Here's that same list in my Diigo account: http://www.diigo.com/user/collin_k/web2.0.

So many ideas, so little time!

The topic for Week 3 is blogs. Looks like I may be a little ahead of the curve on that one.