Week Three: Social Bookmarking

First off: My apologies for the broken link. I did follow the text in the book but the format didn't seem to work. If you follow the changes below you should be fine.

This was a really interesting tool to discover through this class. I am surprised it's not being talked about like Twitter is these days, maybe in time.

I started by signing up for an account which was pain free, just a username and password. Then I started to fumble around the site. Only issue: my computer didn't recognize "del.icio.us" like in the text, but had no issue with http://delicious.com/

After signing in,the account took my bookmarks (existing) and put them into the account. I'm not sure if I like that now I reflect back. It may have created lots of work for me. All the links appear without tags. I then started clicking "edit" for each, trying to group them together and label with common tags. This is a handy feature.

Next I tried to make groups for the tags and this is fairly easy, just click on settings, and edit tag groups. Follow the steps and it does it all for you! I liked that - they are visible on the right hand side of my delicious.com/slockie screen.

After playing around with those functions I tried to search for a topic to see what would happen. I put in "Wind" and got a bunch of good hits. When I looked at who else had this page bookmarked I found a ton of other awesome DIY wind project pages. What an awesome tool to do research!

The best part is you can search for a single tag like wind by typing in your web browser "http://delicious.com/tag/wind" - that's it! the book was right on. Then I wanted the RSS feed, so you just add that to the web address "http://delicious.com/rss/tag/wind". I am now linked to the feed.

For classroom enhancement this tool will be a great aid. If you need some ideas for hands on projects to supplement difficult dry topics, this will help you find them. I think this will be great for apprenticeship training or other interactive sessions, as someone seems to have posted projects they have already tried and completed - the wind example even had instructions and a material list. This could cut down on some of the research end of planning some class activities.

Go to http://delicious.com/slockie to see what I came up with.

Screencast Link - Training Video For Wire Pulling

I still think a link to a third party video site is probably better - better quality and bigger picture.

This is the same clip but in a different format.

Copy and paste the link to view:
http://www.screencast.com/t/wEJef27JM2

Embed Video Attempt - Training Video in Blog Size

Embed Video to Blog

I just found out that blogs have video settings at 400 by 300. So most videos are not that size. If you drop the clip into a program like Camtasia Studio you can save it as a blog video with a new name and try posting it again.

You learn something everyday - much more on the net...

Video Embed Attempt

Vacation is over

In the Park


Well that ends a nice week off on vacation. I got to go to Fundy National Park in New Brunswick, Canada just a short drive from Nova Scotia.
Awesome scenery. This is low tide - Fundy has the highest tides in the world.
I just wanted to try adding pictures to my blog- result: a difficult experience to get them to layout how you want them to.

Signing On

Well that was painless!

I did manage to stumble my way through the set up fairly easily... Signing on to set up an account with blogger.com, I never realized they were affiliated with Google.

Already having a google groups account, I was able to use my profile and jump straight in. (If you're thinking about forming a group for a project, use Yahoo. It's easier, more organized and cleaner. )

The whole experience of setting this up was super fast - probably less than ten minutes with video links thrown in. I still want to come back and customize it some more. I can't believe how easy some of this technology is and the effect it will have for training union members for their day to day jobs.

My initial thoughts about blogs were of computer type people discussing Star Trek episodes or something, but this has really awesome potential for training. For me, I could set up a blog for code problems that occur in the work I'm involved in (Wind, Solar, High Tech projects) and have the common solutions posted right here. It's just one more tool to make our lives easier....