Retro-Using Delicious

I have been doing a little puttering around in delicious -- an online social bookmarking tool, in case you are not familiar with it -- after neglecting it for some time. Just for fun, I did some searching under the plpresearch tag (for Powerful Learning Practice) with a further search refinement under Twitter. Here's what I learned:

There are two new tools for Twitter that I did not know about: GroupTweet and Nurph. The former transforms a Twitter account into a private group messaging system. The latter allows tweeters to create a chat. I can definitely think of some classroom applications for both.

Which brings me to the other stuff I learned: that early studies have found correlations between using social media such as twitter in the classroom and student engagement, and the School Library Journal reports that the conciseness required by tweeting in 140 characters or less can actually help students improve their writing skills.

I'm gratified to see the research bearing out what I have "felt" from my observations in the classroom in the past few years. Students are becoming better writers because they are writing more than ever! So why aren't we using these tools more in the classroom -- and I mean both delicious and Twitter?

I continue to be shocked at how few students use delicious, especially, when they are hopping from one computer to another all day long. I know that our students learn about delicious in their Tech classes in the 8th or 9th grade, so why don't they continue to do so when they continue with research projects later on?

Blogging on Demand and Shopping with RSS

I am feeling a little bit like my students must -- I have been "assigned" a blog. Ugh. Somehow the fact that I have been given a topic and sent to my blogging room is not sitting well with my blogging muse. And this makes me wonder what we are doing to blogging with our students. Remember when journals were the rage? Students had to "journal" for every class! What a chore! Now my seniors are working on three blogs, and I had planned to introduce a fourth tomorrow! Too much!

That said, I enjoyed tooling around a few suggested blogs, experiencing the variety, seeing the form's flexibility. I learned a few things too -- glogs can be embedded on wikispaces, for instance. Good to know.

And I'm getting more comfortable with commenting, especially when I read the blogs of the "big dogs." Blogging is liberating in that way -- I am allowed to offer something of value to the conversation based on my thinking and experience.

I am going to use this blog to talk about RSS too. I have been using RSS ever since Will Richardson himself taught me how to do it at an ISTE poster session oh so long ago. It amazes me still how so many people don't know how what RSS is or how to use it to make their lives easier.

I think I use RSS a bit differently, however. I'm definitely not a daily reader -- don't have the time. But I do use it to "shop around" to various blogs I like when I have a spare moment before class or when I'm on hold on the telephone. There is a surprise element here that I like -- I never know what will turn up. It's a bit like a controlled stumbleupon indulgence.

I have used iGoogle to gather my students' work or to corral updated sites for their further study and reflection. This is iGoogle's attraction for me over Google Reader -- I can see a whole page of sites at a glance, and I can share groups of them with others, as in this collection of my seniors' project sites (one of the results of our PLP work last year). iReader may do this too, for all I know (it has been a long time since I've used it). I have heard lately that it's good for sharing comments with a group over time, sort of google wave fashion.

Back to my earlier point, however... I wonder if we need to show a little blog restraint. At what point do we reach OVERKILL?