write up your reflections

2007-05-23T20:50:56Z

Write Your Reflections Here

After you complete the exercise, please add your name, email, and link to your user page. Below your name, write the answers to the reflection questions below. Please complete this before May 23rd. If you have questions, leave them on my user page: Beth Kanter

Did you find tagging exercise useful? Why or why not?
What surprised you?
How will you integrate the use of tagging into your practice?

Debrief Tagging Exercise: May 23rd

1. Just Three Words About Tagging

fun

easy

useful

interesting

helpful

clarifying

thought provoking

enjoyable

powerful

connected

potential

helpful

feedback from others

frustrating

potentially useful

2. Reflections: Why Useful

Fun

It is easy and after bookmarking a few tags, got even easier

The experience of seeing other resources or tags that you hadn't thought about

You feel connected to other people in your circle via the tag

Tagging makes it easy to share

Tagging makes resources discoverable

Enjoying reading other people's bookmarks, living vicariously through other's tags

Useful

My own bookmarks in my favorite's list was getting messy and I haven't used them

I could actually find stuff in del.icio.us

Added benefit of being able to go to any computer and find my resources

The mobility is great, much better than slips of paper

Got more useful after playing with the del.icio.us bundling feature (able to regroup in categories)

The bundling feature helped me clarify my thoughts

Some are careful others come back and clean up

People use a combination of careful tagging while in the moment of discovery, others don't and circle back to do clean up.

Intention is important - when intentionally researching a topic, more careful about selecting tag words and annotations like using index cards in the library to take notes

Knowing that other people might be reading the tag stream, either colleagues or others, more careful about annotation

Use it as part of the blogging publishing process - capture something I want to write about or put on linkblog. The act of publishing tagged resources make the tagger more careful

Tag maintenance tasks are important

Tag maintenance is needed, particularly merging tags or search and replace

The bundling feature is important to learn how to use if you don't want to deal with a

long list of tags

It takes time to do maintenance

In the moment of tagging

Look at how other people have tagged an item and use those words

Consistency issue a problem - should I use hyphens or not

Best practice seems to be to use a lot of words to describe something so you have the best chance of re-finding it later

Intentional thinking about my work topics and later retrieval

Found it useful to add keywords that match my work programs

Adds to the notes, 'what am I thinking about right now" to remind myself how I might use it later

Some feel validated when they tag a resource that many other people have tagged

Frustrating

Del.icio.us interface isn't the clearest

Pointers to other screencasts not as helpful

How to make it a habit

Switch from bookmarking stuff to tagging - Just do It, Like Nike!

First impulse was to add something to favorites, but no longer and I happy with myself!

Habit at looking at feed of network RSS feed in del.iciou.us

Knowing other people are reading it, so will take the time to do it.

Helps to have colleagues on staff or workgroup also using it.

Three Words About Tagging

explore more

network

consistency

promising

focus

diversify

connect

organize better

network

import

connect

opportunity

better

motivated

Participants' Reflections

Bruce Emmons

Did you find tagging exercise useful? Why or why not?
Yes, but I wish I had had more time to work with it.

What surprised you?
The wide variety of sites available.

How will you integrate the use of tagging into your practice?
Most likely to explore "brave new worlds" where I have not previously ventured.

Beth Raney

Yes, this tagging exercise was very useful to me. Using the same unique tag as others used helped me to find some really good items. I was surprised that there are so many articles that I wouldn't have found on my own. I will continue to integrate the use of tagging with del.icio.us into my day-to-day work.

Kevin Gamble

I've been using del.icio.us for a while so the tagging part was mostly about remembering to use the extag tag. Several times I had to go back and add it as I forgot. I enjoyed the pivot browsing and looking through the tags of others. I was surprised to find that everyone didn't tag just technology articles. People have other interests? I had no idea! It never occurred to me to tag things from other areas of my life: bicycling, photography, bird watching... So I'm going to start. I also found several articles while pivot browsing that I had already bookmarked. I saw the articles in other's lists and said, "This looks interesting", and then went to bookmark them only to find that I already had. This alerted me that perhaps I need to look at my own bookmarked items more frequently.

My last reflection is that it would be really nice if we could actually get people doing this in their Extension work. I really like seeing what my colleagues find of interest, and I think this is a really good way to strengthen our communities. Could you imagine how powerful it would be if all Extension professionals did social bookmarking? Powerful stuff!

Ann LaVigna

Did you find the tagging exercise useful?
Yes, I had heard about del.icio.us, but hadn't gotten around to actually trying it, so having an assignment was a good way for me to get started. Once I got started - I realized that it was fun, easy, and useful. Plus, if I hadn't done the excercise, I wouldn't have found out about PDF Pad - thank you jdorner! (I love graph paper)

What surprised you?
I was surprised that with very little time spent, I could get interesting information. Also, it is not that much work to tag something if you are browsing anyway.

How will you integrate the use of tagging into your practice?
I can see doing a tag search in addition to more traditional searches to seek out info - it looks like you might get more relevant results depending on the topic. Also, My IE Favorites and Firefox bookmarks are so unorganized and so all over the place on different computers, that they are barely useful. I think I might abandon them and rely on tags - it seems easier to get back to the page you wanted to remember (and find out similar pages from other people's tags).

Chris Koehler

Did you find the tagging exercise useful?
Yes, it sort of forced me to think about how I might actually use it related to my work.

What surprised you?
Ease and simplicity of the process

How will you integrate the use of tagging into your practice?
I've only focused on my tags - not looked to see who else might be tagging information of interest to me. I'm sure once I do, it will save me time and I'll learn about new sites that I would otherwise miss.

Denyse Sturges

Did you find tagging exercise useful? Why or why not?
Yes - doing organized tagging was helpful, looking for things specific to a process rather than just hit-or-dash as they occur.

What surprised you?
Knowing that others would definitely be reading my links/tags made me a little more careful of what I included for the public side.

How will you integrate the use of tagging into your practice?
I am getting better. I was out traveling last week and purposely put things into del.icio.us so that I could access and share links while on the road. (Unfortunately, my guest login didn't work so I couldn't share them anyway.)

Floyd Davenport

I'm just getting started with Delicious... sometimes I'm not sure what I want to add... I find it educational because the tag cloud can help define an overview of my interests... plus I find it educational as it provides a nice tool for finding information and people.

Watching: write up your reflections

write up your reflections

Write Your Reflections Here

Debrief Tagging Exercise: May 23rd

Participants' Reflections