Social Bookmarking & RSS feeds Harnessing the potential of innovation in IT to inform guidance practice Lucy Marris 2006

Social Bookmarking A definition from There’s lots of other useful background on social bookmarking here too! A definition from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking: Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. - a personal knowledge management tool’ Lucy Marris 2006

So what does that mean in practice? Social bookmarking is basically just like using your 'favourites' on you own pc for reference, but with some crucial differences … You save your 'favourites' not just in you own private space, but in a public area where anyone who is aware of your account can view them You can use some sophisticated 'tagging' to categorise or label your websites in anyway you choose If anyone else has found the same item of interest and stored it as well, you can see this straight away - you can then go and view other items in their personal libraries What this means is you might find a rich resource of related items that someone else has been researching. It enables you to rapidly build up worthwhile resources The more people who participate in social bookmarking with the relevant software (in this case del.icio.us) the more powerful the resource On the NGRF and EGCRF we are using new technology developed by Knownet to display these powerful resources in a user-friendly way on the EGCRF and NGRF websites – lets have a look …. Lucy Marris 2006

Click here for useful summary of social bookmarks Lucy Marris 2006

Lucy Marris 2006

Lucy Marris 2006

e.g. click the first item and you can access it like this Lucy Marris 2006

Even better Clearly social bookmarking is a great way of disseminating resources to users of the NGRF and EGCRF but there’s something even better! This display shows only the one hundred most recently tagged items, if you want to see everything the NGRF team at IER have tagged click on the link at: http://del.icio.us/ngrf And you can really access shared knowledge from other researchers in cyberspace! Lucy Marris 2006

From here you can see who else has spotted the same items as you and tagged them – they might be researching the same themes 45 people think Helen Barrett’s item is interesting – see who they are by clicking the link Lucy Marris 2006

Wgreller is one – there is a tag for e-learning which looks interesting click on it and see if what else is there Lucy Marris 2006

There are 8 items on this theme the first looks promising – just click on it to have a look – if you like it then it’s possible to import this into your own bookmarking account using the ‘save this’ key Lucy Marris 2006

Hey presto – you have access to someone else’s ideas all in the spirit of open knowledge sharing! Lucy Marris 2006

The EGCRF On the EGCRF www.guidance-europe.org From the front page Select ‘focus groups by country’ Scroll down to choose ‘equal opportunities – underpinning effective practice’ Select e.g. ‘gender’ and see how resources gathered using social bookmarking are being displayed on the site Remember, this resource is constantly updated each time a new website is saved to the NGRF account and given a relevant category or tag – in this example, ‘gender’ Lucy Marris 2006

Lucy Marris 2006

To set up an account Go to the delicious website and follow the instructions – you can set up a link directly from your tool bar – find out more from: http://del.icio.us/ Click on register and follow instructions Lucy Marris 2006

RSS feeds There’s lots of other useful background on rss feeds here too A definition from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format) RSS is a family of web feed formats. The initialism "RSS" is variously used to refer to the following standards: Really Simple Syndication Rich Site Summary RDF Site Summary In the typical scenario of using web feeds, a content provider publishes a feed link on their site which end users can register with an aggregator program running on their own machines; when instructed, the aggregator asks all the servers in its feed list if they have new content; if so, the aggregator either makes a note of the new content or downloads it. Aggregators can be scheduled to check for new content periodically. Lucy Marris 2006

So what does that mean in practice? RSS is basically a way of monitoring activity on your favourite websites. It means you are automatically notified of any new content without having to go and check the site daily yourself. This enables you to ‘watch’ potentially hundreds of websites every day without wasting time endlessly surfing them ‘just in case’ some examples: Get an outline of new journal articles as soon as they arrive If you have posted an item on a website and want to know when anyone responds an RSS feed will tell you straight away To use an RSS feed you need to download some simple software You need to tell the software which sites you want it to monitor for you (use the distinctive RSS logo) You need to check your RSS feed regularly – this becomes second nature very quickly – a bit like checking your emails! Lucy Marris 2006

RSS feeds and the NGRF From the front page of the NGRF you can access a really good summary all about RSS feeds and where to find them on the NGRF website: http://www.guidance-research.org/about-ngrf/newsfeeds/ Lucy Marris 2006

Click here for more details and to download free software Lucy Marris 2006

http://www. guidance-research. org/collaborate/guidance/weblog http://www.guidance-research.org/collaborate/guidance/weblog.help/about-rss Lucy Marris 2006

At IER we’ve been using FeedReader it is free and so far no problems … Lucy Marris 2006

Lucy Marris 2006

Del.icio.us and RSS Harnessing the potential of innovation in IT to inform guidance practice Using these two resources together means you can be immediately alerted to useful web-based resources and websites through an RSS feed and then if you like it, instantly add it to the social bookmarking account for automatic inclusion in the NGRF and EGCRF websites – a really powerful resource for guidance! Lucy Marris 2006