On digital bookmarking

First what is first: Bookmarking is a method of organisation of websites that is personal and allows us to go back to interesting things we have found while surfing the net.

Second what is second: There are mainly two ways of doing this.

Browser-based bookmarking: We can rely on browsers and their "Favourites" section for what I call everyday bookmarking (i.e. saving pages we use/read everyday such as our mail account, social networks, newspapers, blogs). In my personal opinion, Google Chrome is the one that defeats the competence in this aspect since it provides the possibility of saving your favourites inside your Google account. Resulting in us having our favourites everywhere we open the browser after logging in into our account.

Everyday bookmarks are only useful if they are easily accessible all the time. Ways to increase their accessibility are different in each browser:
Google Chrome: Easiest solution, we only have to erase the site title and leave only the thumbnail that represents it: http://i.imgur.com/B1SUH.jpg
Mozilla Firefox: The solution here is a bit more complicated. We must download an add-on called Smart Bookmarks Bar that is free, which installs itself automatically inside the browser. It gives us the possibility of having only thumbnails with no text in our bookmarks bar by hiding the text. The add-on can be downloaded from  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/smart-bookmarks-bar. It should end up looking something like this: http://i.imgur.com/kJIua.jpg.
Internet Explorer: Here the solution is similar to that of Google Chrome. Only difference is that we cannot leave an empty name for thumbnails. We solve it by typing only a dash (-). It won't look good. It will need more space. But it works.

If we want to save more bookmarks than we need in the everyday life, we might experience some problems with browser-based organisation since, to the best of my knowledge, no raw browser offers the choice to tag* the links we save, which is key if we have more than 40-50 links "favourited".

Website-based bookmarking: Since 1996, there have emerged different websites that provided a way to organise our links based on tagging. It makes it a lot easier to look for that old .PDF file you once saved about how whales milk their baby-whales because you must have tagged it as whales, milking, or maybe as weird. The point is that it is going to be more easily retrievable if you have your links organised this way than if you have to go over a huge list, reading everything, to find only one thing.
Some options?
Delicious.com: This site is the most popular of all free bookmarking services. However, I find it a little outdated, sluggish and 1.0-ish. Every change you make needs to be saved, forcing the whole site to refresh (which by the way is particularly heavy and tends to take its time). The way we have to organise things is somehow linear and it does not provide any screenshot of the page or something to identify one from another apart from the title. To sum up, Delicious.com is a reliable and  trusted alternative despite having its cons.
Zootool.com: I am currently experimenting with this alternative. What is different in zootool.com? It defines itself as a free visual bookmarking service, that is, every page has its own screenshot. Many times we have several websites with similar tags and having the possibility of recognising the one we are looking for visually is a point Zootool wins. The site provides you with an easy-to-place button called 'lasso,' which saves pages automatically to Zootool, working like a Favourite button. All in all, we could say that Zootool is a step forward but we need remember that it is not (still?) widely recognised and its reliability -although I still have had no problems with it- is not as high as Delicious's.
What zootool.com looks like: http://i.imgur.com/Y3SHX.jpg

*tag: to write key words so as to recognise quickly what the bookmarked site is about.

The Digital-Nativism Fallacy

Surfing the Internet I found that there is a lot of criticism against Prensky's ideas about digital natives and immigrants.

One idea that I totally agree with is that expressed by Bayne and Ross (2007). They state that we should not rely on a binary distinction as Prensky suggests but rather, to look at the matter acknowledging diversity. Krause (2007) researched about this topic in Australian universities and found that factors like socio-economic background and gender are as, or more, important than age when it comes to 'test' how we handle technology.
I think we should be able to understand the possibilities technology provides us and not be afraid of the fact that we weren't born sitting opposite to a computer. As well as intelligent whiteboards, CDs, videos and even a chalk, a computer is a tool, another resource to add to the plethora of choices we have at hand.
What makes the PC 'different' or so 'revolutionary'? It can be claimed that the ground-breaking feature of PCs lies in the fact that it can emulate many, if not all, of the past resources. A book is a .pdf file, a blackboard is a graphic software being projected through a beamer (and the whole pencil-case its tools), a calculator is always installed with the Operating System, games of any kind have their digital version, etc. Bearing this in mind we should also remember that the only thing a computer cannot be is a teacher.
We can conclude by saying that a knowledgeable teacher able to handle different software to cater for each topic's needs is going to make his / her work easier, more engaging and dynamic.

Source: http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/natives_final.pdf

Testing.. one, two, three...

Nice. A blog. Taking the form of a reflective journal. Aim: to follow the development of thought during this subject ►ECO II.
We'll see what happens.