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Social Bookmarking 1: Del.icio.us

I'm giving del.icio.us a twirl around the dance floor, and I like what I see.

For background on social bookmarking, visit the this informative document:

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf

It's a great overview, which means that I am just going to add my personal thoughts.

The number one reason for me using it is that I can tag. This means that if I have an article on assessing the quality of portfolios, I can put all those key words in as tags.

So, in three weeks when I am looking for links on portfolios, all I have to do is to type "portfolio" in my search and the links with that tag will pop up. Of course, the down side is that if I type in "quality" I'm going to get this article too.

If i add another identifier, I still get all of the same links, but the order of the links displayed changes to put the link with both tags on top.

Sharing would have to be the second reason for using del.icio.us. I am hoping that as the ELI site becomes more mature, I'll be able to look up what others in the organization have bookmarked. It will save me time for searching. Will I miss something because some one used a tag I did not? Probably, but when I do a search on the "cost of course delivery" in Google, I get 17,000,000 responses. I anticipate finding helpful information that is tailored to higher education and technology. The likely hood of getting a good match is increased when you go to an individuals page. At this point, you can see their list of tags. The list will guide you in your choice of search words.

I've still got lots to learn about del.icio.us, but I think it's worth my time and effort. Please take a moment to see what I've posted. I am working my way through my large bookmark file and transferring and tagging them, so I'll have new stuff every week.

http://del.icio.us/christycain

The Importance of Matrices 3

Matrix³

The Importance of Matrices

Here is a quote from Joanne Martin in her book on Cultural Theory. She talks about the importance of using a matrix to understand and decipher information.  It’s well written and to the point.

“When content themes are combined with cultural forms and formal and informal practices, we have the pieces of a cultural puzzle. We can explore how interpretations of these cultural manifestations relate to each other by summarizing the results of a cultural study– the pieces of the cultural puzzle, in one or more matrices. Columns in a matrix are types of cultural manifestations (such) as rituals or stories) and rows are types of cultural manifestations, are context specific content themes (such as the need to take a long term perspective or the company’s concern for employee well being). A matrix is useful because it shows precisely how culture has been operationalized… Such a matrix clearly exposes what a given researcher has actually studied when he or she claimed to be studying culture. A matrix is useful for summarizing the results of other people’s studies, or it can be used to summarize the results of your own culture research. It is meant as a supplement-not a substitute-for a full description of research results, whether theirs results are written in prose (as in an ethnographic portrait) or represented in statistics.

Such matrices are also useful because too often a cultural study is just a richly detailed description; the underlying patters of interpretation and theory of culture are difficult to decipher. When such a study is summarized in a series of matrices, theoretical assumptions become easier to see because the patterns of interpretations, across manifestations are made evident. The cell entries in such matrices, and the underlying patterns of interpretation of those cultural manifestations, show how a researcher has answered the following questions:  What is culture? What is not culture? Often, it is the empty cells and omissions that will be most important in making this diagnosis. Used in this way, a matrix is a prompt for deductive theorizing: You can see what has been studied, and how it has been interpreted, to determine what theory is in use.”

Joanne Martin, (2002). Organizational Culture: Mapping the Terrain. Sage Publications. (126-127)