Social Bookmarking – Del.icio.us

So if you like a website, you can save it to your favorites, and every time you want to access it you can click on favorites and there it is – that is, if you are on the same computer. If you are using a different computer, however, you’ll be out of luck. So, I would like to suggest a program that we are learning about – called “Del.icio.us”. It is a lot like your favorites list, but because it is web-based you can access it from anywhere. You simply register for an account, install the buttons onto your internet browser, and start saving your favorite pages. To keep things organized (because we all know that I like things organized) you can tag each site, with labels or keywords like “news” or “gossip” or “email”, keywords that you would normally use to search for the given site. Then as your list of sites gets longer, you can click on your alphabetized tag list to narrow down your say, 130 sites, to more like 5. (Or however many you have tagged as whatever you’re looking for) This way you don’t have to scroll through each time. What’s also cool is that other people can see your list if you have tags in common, and then you wind up compiling a large list of sites that have things in common. This can be very useful if used to its full potential. Because of this ability to share sites – it is called Social Bookmarking.

Here’s a clear and understandable video tutorial on how and why to use Social Bookmarking:

RSS Feeds & Feed Readers

 An RSS Feed is a way to subscribe to frequently updated websites. So if you have a favorite news headline, blog, or podcast, an RSS Feed will bring the updates to your computer. To subscribe – just click on the orange button. Every day, next to the ‘favorites’ button, you can click on your RSS Feeds and see what’s new, without having to check each individual website. That’s pretty cool, except that your feeds are saved only to that one computer. What’s cooler is using a Feed Reader, also called ‘aggregators’ - like Google Reader, Newsgator, or FeedDemon (see here for a list of readers). A Feed Reader allows you to save your RSS Feeds to a website, which you can access from any computer, and you can read what’s new on your sites right from the aggregator. So – that’s a lot neater than just adding favorites.

Here’s a video about RSS Feeds, in plain plain English:

Thanks for checking in on our ITGS class, and tomorrow we’ll post about social bookmarking.

This Week in ITGS

Today we went over our syllabus, we’re talking about what we will do this year. It looks like we will have two major papers to write, one is four short answers and the other three structured questions. The first will be about social and ethical issues and IT systems in a social context, the second will be social and ethical issues in a social context and areas of impact. We will also be working on a portfolio of three 800-1,000 word essays, plus a 1,000 word extention on one of the pieces. The portfolio is for the internal assessment, the papers will be sent for an external assessment. It sounds like a lot of work, but I think it will be fun. (More fun once I figure out the Turkish keyboard!)

I’m excited to get into it, to start choosing topics and researching and exploring. We have 5hours per week of class time, and 3 hours will be for lessons and 2 for researching/exploring.

This blog will serve as a log, which the program requires that we keep. I will post about my ITGS work as we get to it.

That’s all for now, more when more happens

- Kyra

ITGS at ACI

Merhaba – or, “Hello World”,

This blog will be used as a journal for my ITGS class here at ACI, Information Technology In A Global Society. It’s a very new course, we are test dummies. I’m not sure what to expect, it’s a computer course with two students and one teacher. We will be updating these blogs weekly – or so, weekly is the goal anyway.

More when more happens, thanks for readiıng,

- Kyra