Participate 1 - Joining a DLC
Digital Learning Communities (DLC) are Internet based sites that allow groups of people to share and collaborate with one another. Corporations have long recognized the need for collaboration and have used commercial programs like Sharepoint as controlled, collaborative document repositories.
While commercial blogs are effective and secure for business, educators’ interests are further ranging and more open. Many educators have created their own websites and blogs that allow for a free flow of discussion, collaboration, and interaction.
There are literally dozens of educator Digital Learning Communities. Keeping track of the URL’s is difficult using a standard browser bookmark system. Browser’s, like Google’s Chrome, bookmark systems tend to be rigid (folder based) and difficult to manage. Browser based bookmarks are also difficult to copy to new machines. The bookmarks from an educator’s home machine usually are not transferable to office or library computer systems.
In response to the need for a portable and free bookmark system, several vendors have created secure sites where users could store and access their bookmarks from any Internet location. These services went by fanciful names like Delicous, Symbaloo, Digio, and Google Bookmarks.
While creating this post, the author joined two sites: Symbaloo and Google Bookmarks. Symbaloo allows shared access and provides a colorful and intuitive interface called WebMix. The WebMix page has tiles that can be assigned to an Internet URL with icons and text descriptions for identification. Symbaloo also has WebMix template pages populated with popular links to sites of interest.
Google Bookmarks requires the use of Google Chrome as the browser and a Google email account. Google bookmarks are accessible by logging into Chrome with the appropriate Google Gmail account.
Symbaloo also had a WebMix template for Digital Learning Communities. The DLC WebMix page had links to nearly 60 sites of interest to digital learners.
I particularly liked the Tumblr.com blog and collaboration website. While used extensively as a free and easy to use blogging site, (you are on a Tumblr blog now), Tumblr can be used as a creative collaborative site. I have my students create their own blogs for classroom discussions and have other students comment and contribute. The best site is usually the one with the most followers, and my students enjoy trying to attract the most followers for the class.
Creating a Tumblr blog only requires an email address. Not only is Tumblr fun and creative, but the artifacts posted are permanent and can be referenced even after the course has closed.