Tag the good stuff. Duh.

Re: Are you burying your content? Ever feel really dumb when you have the tools to make what seems like a comp […]

I am also trying Za href= “http://www.ethomaz.com/onlife/”> Onlife to archive my web crawling to try and keep track of the stuff I find that I can never seem to get back to.

I wish I could easily solve this one, but tagging is killing me. Part of me wants to use as few tags as possible while another part of me wants to make my tags as specific as possible. Being too specific, however will leave me with too many tags.

Unfortunately, my frustration with tagging has left me with not tagging much in my blogs at all lately. I’m open to any and all input on this one.

I am very new to reading educational stuff written in blog form; I have been investigating / reading for about 3 months only. I agree that there’s some really good stuff out there that is “buried” under everything new. For someone new to it all, it really is hard to sometimes find the “good stuff”, especially if you’re searching for something pretty specific. John Pederson’s “Blogs I’m Reading” posts have been a very helpful launching point for me. (I’m so new to this I’m not even sure how to make a link to that list! Sorry!)

As a high school science teacher, I’m also trying to figure out how to get this “new internet” into my classes. I’ve been considering a blog, but I am unsure about giving up my “static” homepage - as it is something that I can alreaqdy update easily everyday. (It is built on a hosting template.)
I’d like to get the students writing / contributing, but I don’t want my class information to get
lost or “buried”. I think that I am going to keep my webpage, but have a link to our class blog from there. On that blog I’ll try to get more student input / writing.

Last suggestion from a new blog reader - Appropriate titles, labeling, and indexing are real time savers and really do help get new readers into your writings.

Thanks - Amy Hendrickson, Northern Minnesota

You are absolutely right on this post, Steve, the rate and quantity at which new technologies and resources are coming out is astounding. If people are not connected to the blogosphere and participating in the read/write web, I don’t see any way people can be aware of even a fraction of what is available and going on. At the TechForum this past week, I was surprised by how many people had never heard of Creative Commons. Almost no one I meet here in Lubbock has heard of WikiPedia. I take both these things for granted basically. So something is going on here that really needs to be addressed.

I think part of the answer is getting educators involved in participating in the read/write web. This needs to be required for professional development, teacher certification, and continuing education. Of course we want people to voluntarily participate, but I think participation needs to be required for many to give it more than a second glance.

So many people are overloaded and overwhelmed with information and tasks today, that many (if not most) would see read/write web participation as something they can’t physically do. I think it is safe to say there is a new digital divide emerging, which is not hardware based. Even for people who have the hardware and other things required to connect them to the web, the vast majority of educators out there are are not engaged in the read/write web. I think I may do an upcoming podcast or article on this topic. It is really important.

Thanks for the post, and good luck catching up on the last 90 days!

Here’s how I tried to handle it over on my website. I grabbed Chris Metcalf’s WordPress plugin. I made up two tags…”mustread” and “pd”…in my del.icio.us account. Using the WordPress del.icio.us plugin, I created a sidebar category for “mustread” posts that I think all edubloggers should pay attention to. Anything I tag “mustread” in del.icio.us goes into this category. Same story for the tag “pd”, but this is just a collection of my own own favorite posts tagged in del.icio.us.

Does that make sense? There are probably simpler ways to do it…link lists in WordPress, TypePad, etc…I just wanted a way to incorportate Del.icio.us into the workflow.