Learning with the Fang

Stephen Downes poses an interesting question about something I participated in – the ‘tidal wave’ of edubloggers joining the interesting but not so new social bookmarking thingy called ‘diigo’:

I’m not sure exactly what triggered this rush… The site has been around for a few months; I flagged a resource in my aggregator from Beth Kanter last September on the site. But the flood came over the weekend.

Well here is my story and a suggestion that two ’supernodes’ in my ‘network’ played an important part:

Beth Kanter is the absolute ’supernode’ of the nonprofit blogosphere. If you could only subscribe to one RSS feed for the entire sector, hers would put you well and truly in the picture. Likewise Stephen Downes and his OlDaily RSS feed for the Education sector. I would have read about diigo at least three or four times from these two sources alone since September last year. I don’t recall reading about it, and felt no reason to explore it at the time.

Over the weekend I did notice a number of twitter ‘tweets’ from people I follow in the Ed-Tech community. This time I took note that some of my colleagues were joining at about the same time. Then I saw an e/mail invitation to join diigo from Alex Hayes (with whom I have been recently collaborating on a wiki). My immediate thought was that Alex had been tricked into spamming me so I did a quick search and found this reference to ‘Dean’s Headache’ – an edublogger apologizing to his gmail contacts for unintentionally inviting them to join diigo.

Then I tuned into the live audio stream for EdTechTalk (the uber-supernode of educational technology network) and it was all diigo. So I decided to sign up and see what all the fuss is about (and be very careful not to spam my gmail contacts). I was pleasantly surprised that I could use my openid, and easily import my delicious bookmarks. I saw no attempt to get me to invite my gmail contacts. At once, I could see a lot of social network function (that is kinda buried in delicious) exposed thru the UI and found myself connected to a community who share my recent obsession with ’stigmergy’. Which brings me to my point – the weekend ‘tidal wave’ may have been triggered by the ‘real time’ events of twitter tweets and edtechtalk live audio, fuelled by interest/awareness generated through the social network (and a little bit of ye olde email spam here and there).

Certainly an interesting phenomenon to be caught up in. A great way to experience the ’social’ nature of a new social web site – join it at the same time as a whole bunch of colleagues.

Fang – Mike Seyfang