October 2007 Volume 10 Number 4 - Educational Technology ...

the del.icio.us site (see figure 3). Below we take a closer look at these two services from the perspective of new
learning environments for learning through networks.
One important aspect for the learning through networks concept to work is to provide the tools for finding new peers
of content in the network, and to be able to share found peers with other members of the network. Two such
examples of technical support can be found at the Stumbleupon.com site and the del.icio.us web site.
Stumbleupon.com (figure 3, left) works actively with the tag line “Discover new sites” and that is also the essence of
the site. On Stumbleupon.com people can recommend and review sites so that others more easily can get across
relevant information and find sites related to their own interests. The overall idea with Stumbleupon.com is to serve
as a public recommendation service. The del.icio.us site (figure 3, right) on the other hand serves a similar, but
slightly different purpose. Here, the focus is about providing information to make it easier for others to find new
interesting peers in the network. But, it is now just any peer that one might want to recommend to others. Instead, the
central unique idea behind the del.icio.us site is that it is assumed that what is interesting to the single individual
might also be interesting to others. Thus, on the del.icio.us site anyone can share their personal favorites (similar to
“my bookmarks” in a browser) to anyone else. As such, the del.icio.us site builds upon an idea of finding new
interesting material in the network through the glancing at other points of references in the network.
Figure 3. Screenshots from the StumbleUpon site (http://www.stumbleupon.com/), (left), and the del.icio.us site
(http://del.icio.us/), (right)
Del.icio.us can thus be thought of as a new way of sharing your points of reference, which is indeed an important
aspect of any body of knowledge. While Albert Einstein ones said, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide
your sources” we can now start to see the creative power behind mass interaction around shared sources. The
del.icio.us site is only one example. Another example is Wikipedia, the online, user-generated, and user-maintained
dictionary, which contains almost the same amount of information as the Webster´s dictionary (although its accuracy
has been frequently debated during the last two years).
With all these new services in place for uploading and sharing new content across the Internet it also becomes
obvious that there are not only needs for tools to find new peers, but also to keep track of changes at already known
peers of interest (Hoppe, et al., 2005; Jones, et al., 2005, Chen, et al., 2007). Today, we can therefore see a growing
interest in e.g. RSS- and similar technologies to enable people to automate the checking for new content on remote
peers (Miao, et al., 2005; Glotzbach, et al., 2007), and mash-up technologies (Ankolekar, et al., 2007), (including e.g.
yahoo pipes) to enable people to more easily combine different sources of information, and also form new services
(to again support the new learning vehicle of uploading, sharing, and circulating interesting content across the
networks.
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