Kalinago English: research

Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are
the product of disagreement and contest,
not consensus or compromise.

James Surowiecki

Where can we find research and more information about working in e-communities? Are there any courses you can take online or in person?

Have you read a great book or can you recommend a helpful website or ebook helpful to those new at creating e-communities?

Best,
Karenne

This posting is the final part of the series, Crowd Wise, and is, in part, preparation for the swap-shop on web based communities at the IATEFL conference in Harrogate, April 8th, 2010. Your answers, as brief or as in-depth as you'd like to be, is very much appreciated! To subscribe to all the posts within this specific series, copy and paste this url: http://kalinago.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/crowd-wise into your reader.

Note: if you would like to participate in this conversation anonymously, please do feel free to do so. Alternatively, if you would like to specifically mention an online educational community when making reference to your experiences, adding your group's name and/or its URL, you are most welcome to!

I get asked, every now and then, how are you finding all this great stuff and sharing it?

Some friends and colleagues have an odd feeling that either I am permanently chained to my computer - oh, alright, I am in front of the computer a lot - or I don't go to sleep.

However that's not why I'm able to find things quickly.

It's because of delicious.

Not the pretty cakes in this posting, duh. The bookmarking concept. ;-)

Whenever I'm out and about surfing, whatever it is I am doing whether it's checking out Camper's new online shoe collection, checking my email, researching for themes or ideas in Wikipedia, listening to some CEO talking on TED, visiting one of the forums or groups I like participating in - there's an icon primed and ready, sitting on my firefox toolbar, which I can click to automatically save something into Delicious.

Whenever I come across something I think is worth keeping, or might be worth keeping, I click on the tag button, insert a keyword or two - labels which have a relevancy to me, my life, my business, my professional studies, my classes, lesson ideas, my students' interests and stuff I might be able to blog about later on.

It's an enormously easy system.

Not only can you save all this stuff forever and ever but you can also share what you've saved with other teachers. You can keep some links private.

You can organize and reorganize your tags, add extra tags whenever you want to share something in particular with one person who asks, bundle up stuff into groups and change your mind as often as you change shoes.

You can search within your own or your network's bookmarks without having to try and figure out what you or they "tagged" it as.