EdTags

Posted May 28th, 2007 by Laura Blankenship, Bryn Mawr College

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7 Comments | 1089 Page Views

http://edtags.org/

Stratification in the social bookmarking world had to happen eventually. Digg and del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites tend to be pretty technology heavy and despite the huge number of users, if there's a specific topic you're interested in that isn't related to technology, it can be difficult to find good links. Also, if you're someone who tends to scan the "most popular" list, you're likely to get a mix of hot tech links plus everything to do with Paris Hilton. Educators tend to want links that have a more direct application to teaching and learning or to their specific subject area. Enter EdTags. It doesn't have many links yet, but it appears to be trying to be Digg for education. Some of the most popular tags right now are education, English, tools, web2.0, and games. Most subject areas are represented, so that teachers can find resources pertaining to their subjects. It's small now, but EdTags could become a central location for educators to share links.

How to cite this work

Laura Blankenship. "EdTags." Academic Commons Issue Name (Spring 2008): 04 July 2009. <http://www.academiccommons.org/>.

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Re: EdTags

On December 8th, 2007 Mark (not verified) said:

edtags.org is a great resource, something I believe the education community was in great need of. In fact, we developed a similar concept at www.edutagger.com edutagger.com is still in beta at the time of this post, but anyone is welcome to take a look and provide any feedback.

Re: EdTags

On June 2nd, 2007 Kevin Wiliarty, Wesleyan University said:

Thanks for pointing this service out. It will be interesting to see how it fares compared to Blackboard Scholar. Scholar seems to be pushing the stratification even further than EdTags. Using advanced search features, you can delimit your search by the taggers' highest educational degree, for example. In order to bookmark anything at all you need to be at an institution that uses Blackboard, a point that seems needlessly exclusionary, but the integration with institutional structures, (read: classes are automatically 'groups') is liable to prove attractive to many.

Re: EdTags

On June 6th, 2007 Laura Blankenship, Bryn Mawr College said:

I've played with Scholar a little and I'm not sure how I feel about it. It seems a bit clunky at the moment.

Re: EdTags

On June 1st, 2007 Adam (not verified) said:

This mission-focused community of taggers as you refer to it is exactly why Edtags thrives. Our blog (http://www.blog.edtags.org) indicates that by the end of July we will have group building functionality, related educator recommendations, and a host of other features that make it the ideal place for educators to connect over content.

Re: EdTags

On June 6th, 2007 Laura Blankenship, Bryn Mawr College said:

Adam, I'll be sure to stop by again and check out the new features.

Re: EdTags

On May 31st, 2007 Laura Blankenship, Bryn Mawr College said:

Ken, As a del.icio.us user myself, I agree with you about its usefulness and ease of use. I like the idea of groups or some way to focus in on topics in addition to tags. I do this in an ad hoc way by using the network feature on del.icio.us. You and I may not be the target audience for EdTags and it could be that its interface and smaller focus will appeal to those who are a bit put off by Web 2.0 applications.

Re: EdTags

On May 29th, 2007 Ken (not verified) said:

While I agree that it would be enormously helpful to have some sense of a mission-focused community of taggers (and tags), I'm not sure that EdTags is necessarily a move forward in terms of ease-of-use. I've found del.icio.us to be very easy to use, especially with the Firefox extension - though I also agree that it might be useful to have a more user-friendly del.icio.us web portal. I've often thought that most of the so-called Web 2.0 aps could benefit from offering a "groups" feature, with variations on read/write capability extended to members. It might increase free-riders (i.e., those search on, but not generating tags), but I suspect could improve tag quality, at least for specialized uses.