We spent the vast majority of class time on Thursday with an introduction to the class (from me) and an introduction to the various applications that I want everyone to start using. I'll pick up a thread from my introduction in my next post, but for the moment, I want to offer a little overview of the tech, since I suspect that, for some of you, it came pretty fast and furious.

Here's how I see them fitting together:

Writing: Obviously, the course blogs and your individual blogs are the sites where most of our writing will take place this semester. And again, while I expect entries on the course blog to follow our readings pretty closely, the individual blogs are yours to maintain, both in terms of effort and topic.

Reading: I wholeheartedly believe that it's vital to work with an aggregator, like Bloglines, if you're planning on reading more than a few weblogs with any regularity. Whether you post to your blog on a daily basis, you should get into the habit of visiting Bloglines at least that often, and you should by now have aggregated the feeds of your classmates.

Browsing: Part of the time that I've tried to free up for you by introducing you to Bloglines, and by keeping the weekly reading assignments manageable, is intended to provide you with time to explore, browse, follow up, etc. Again, this is something that you need to get into the habit of doing. If you don't--if you wait until Wednesday nights--you'll miss out on this opportunity.

Bookmarking: del.icio.us is one of the glue apps for us. You can respond to bookmarked sites on your blog (or here), you can use del.icio.us to bookmark entries/sites that you come across in your feeds, and you can build the resources available here on the class site when you do so.

A couple of quick notes about del.icio.us:

I recommend the "pop-up" post, when you add that bookmarklet to your browser. The advantage to this is that it doesn't take you away from the page--it opens up a new window.

Also, when you post a bookmark, you're allowed to "tag" it. Tags can only be single words, though, so if you need to, do multiple words like this: SocialSoftware. Also, every time you bookmark a site, go ahead and add your initials as a tag, so I can keep track of your contributions.

Finally, if you want to tie your bookmark to a particular week, the tag for doing so is wk##. In the interest of keeping it organized, I used a two-digit number for each week, such as "wk02."

That's enough for now. If you're having trouble with any of these tools, let me know.