Echoes of content

 by wdj(0)

Today I had an interesting discussion with a colleague who questioned the value of sharing and curation in education. We were discussing social media tools to be used in a new project and as usual the discussion was a lively comparison of the pros and cons of various tools: discussion in Facebook, curation in Scoopit, link lists in Diigo, Twitter for links and tips, Slideshare for presentations, YouTube for films etc etc. Many of us find this digital diversity perfectly natural but it's always valuable to meet the child who has noticed that the emperor has no clothes on. Are we all so busy sharing that we don't stop to wonder if anyone is listening?

Educators create mountains of learning resources and an increasing number are sharing them as OER but only a tiny amount of this is ever used by anyone else. There seems to be a barrier about using someone else's teaching material, perhaps the inner voice that tells us that we're being in some way "lazy". Often the resource you find is great apart from one small but crucial detail; a culture-specific reference, irrelevant details, wrong style etc. So in the end you need to create your own version and so yet another resource gets stored on a server somewhere. We're all busy filling the world's servers with information yet only a fraction of it is seen by more than a handful of people, if that. Even scientific research disappears quickly into the digital mist as the number of theses and journal articles increases at an alarming rate. As the mountain of titles rises the chances of anyone reading your efforts diminish.

On top of this there is all the time spent sharing these resources via Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Scoopit and many, many more. Here we're not creating anything new, simply creating echoes of someone else's content. We curate pages full of interesting links either individually or with colleagues in a team or project. These can be very useful for your group but I wonder how much further they reach, given the sheer volume of similar resources. So everyone is busy curating, compiling, tweeting, retweeting, sharing and tagging but is anyone listening or is all this a gigantic digital echo-chamber? The intentions are admirable but when everyone is sharing they're too busy to see what others are doing. Before you create another channel, resource, news feed or suchlike it might be good to look around to see if someone else is already doing just this and maybe not bother adding more echoes to the already high volume of digital noise.

As an enthusiastic blogger, curator, tweeter etc who believes in the benefits of sharing knowledge and resources, this discussion disturbed me a little at first. Of course all this openness, sharing and transparency is a good thing! But the more I think of it the more I realise that we need to discuss ways of encouraging digital recycling, reducing background noise and maybe choosing not to add new resources unless absolutely necessary. Just as the physical world is producing more products than can be consumed, we're producing more digital content than can be used.

Delicious - we were only kidding

No sooner than I had posted my farewell to Delicious than Yahoo went public and claimed that they had been misunderstood (see Delicious blog post What's next for Delicious?). They are looking for someone to buy Delicious and insist that they hope that the service will live on. It would have saved a lot of rumour spreading and speculation if this had been clear from the start.

Or maybe they got cold feet when they saw the damage that dumping Delicious would cause to their reputation. That seems to be the conclusion drawn by amongst others Tech Crunch (Yahoo just killed ... consumer confidence in them). From the reactions I saw on Twitter we Delicious fans are a dedicated and vociferous group. It may be a fairly plain vanilla tool with few bells and whistles but it does an excellent job for those of us who like to share our knowledge. With a bit of imagination and a committed owner it could be a star albeit on a limited academic stage. A bargain in the social media Christmas sale?

Goodbye Delicious

One of the main drawbacks to using all the free tools and services on the net is the fact that at any time the owners can pull out the plug leaving you high and dry. That is just what is happening with the social bookmarking tool Delicious, as the owners, Yahoo, have decided suddenly to close it down. I have used Delicious for a couple of years now and have collected an awful lot of bookmarks there, all classified and tagged. I have also built up a very useful network of researchers and enthusiasts whose bookmarks I can follow thanks to RSS subscription. Now it's all being shut down because Yahoo don't seem interested in social bookmarking any more.

Social bookmarking has always been the ugly duckling of the social media scene and as a result is vulnerable to cuts. Since the users are mostly academics it isn't ever going to bring in lots of advertising revenue. I've suspected for a while that no-one was really trying to develop Delicous since I saw very few new features being introduced. Unlike many other social tools it was available only in plain vanilla flavour with few options for personalisation. However I'm convinced that social bookmarking is vital to researchers and business intelligence workers since it enables you to store enormous amounts of bookmarks, tag them for reference, access them from anywhere and share them with colleagues. On the other hand it's never going to make megabucks and is of very limited interest to advertisers.

In the world of free it's inevitable that services will come and go and we just have to accept it. But it is still frustrating to have put a lot of work into building up a collection only to see it closed down. Maybe the academic community or some other public body should try to adopt such important tools and run them as a public service instead of putting our trust in market forces.

The answer to the closure of Delicious is to transfer all bookmarks to the rival and admittedly more versatile Diigo (to see how to do this see Michael Wacker's easy instructions). I did this a few weeks ago just in case but I still have to do a lot of tweeking and adjusting to find the same functions in the new environment. I'm sure I'll find many new openings with Diigo but I'm also sure I'll lose some useful functions from Delicious.The question is how long Diigo will last and if it doesn't is there anyone out there willing to maintain this important service and guarantee continuity?