I very much agree–any way we can encourage those better practices is good. I think that’s why the game idea appealed.

On trickiness with the existing tools is the different varieties of links. So, let’s say that there is a set of Cole’s starting points about globalization, all posts tagged ‘globalization’.

Then a student finds a new resource they want to add. They can link to it, and tag their post ‘globalization’, but they can’t tag that resource itself. That’s where delicious would come in. Something is needed to be able to bring in the resources wherever they are found.

It’d also be nice to be able to signal the relationship between a reflection and the thing that it is a reflection on . That would call for distinguishing between the link to the new resource, and any other links that also appear in the reflection.

And I’m always worried about disambiguating tags.

I think it needs to be simple and flexible. I don’t want to specialize it too much. Stick with the basics: blogs, posts, tags, comments. You can do a lot with these. I think the community is what needs development. We need to jump start communities that are reading, writing, linking, participating.

Do you see where I am heading? I am think of this as a directed starting point, but letting the students add new knowledge into that pool as they collect their own evidence. It could be further enhanced if they leave comments on the sites they are tagging along the way — or perhaps better yet, using some sort of a trackback to indicate that they both linked and posted a meta reflection of that site.

Does that make any sense?

On the issues…first one I see is directed vs. undirected relationships. This twists up what I said above about the sequence. So, if I’ve tagged two pages with “linkgame:ipod2jfk1″ to signal the first step in connecting the concepts, so far I don’t have info about which is 1st. And additional “a” and “b” at the end could do that job. Or, the delicious feed reports the timestamp, so if players bookmark the start first and the end second, we could derive the direction from that. Different paths could partly be differentiated by player (id’d by delicious username,also in the delicious data) But problems if there are two paths from the same person. Maybe a second tag to differentiate paths in that case? Or, build our own thing that asks for the direction, distinguishes paths, etc.

For the common tag applications/games/activities, just the usual use of delicious tags would probably suffice.

Really smart idea of using the delicious tags … just a quick question, could we implement (not sure why) our own open source social bookmarking app specifically for this purpose or is delicious/google bookmarks the way to go?

For a sequence, maybe using tags like

“linkgame:ipod2jfk1″, “linkgame:ipod2jfk2″, etc.

If all those longish tags can be made easier with a sidebar app, all the better!

Whaddya think?