You're reading the 101st Stingy Scholar post. I started this blog to keep track of the best free educational materials available on the web. Unfortunately, this site is getting so large that it's hard to keep track of my own posts.Del.icio.us should help. Under the username stingyscholar, I bookmarked the URL to each post. Using del.icio.us' tags and improved search capabilities, I hope that you guys will be better able to find useful posts and save them in your del.icio.us accounts.
I tried to pick a discrete number of tags and arrangethem under "bundles" for liberal arts, news, science, and sources. Without describing what every tag means, know that "archive" identifies sites which contains large archive of content (books, audiobooks, videos, etc.) and "courses" identifies sites that offer full courses. You might also find good stuff with the podcasts, video, and tools tags. "Applications" describes both free software and AJAX-powered browser applications.
Try it out. I'm open to suggestions on how to make these tags more user-friendly. Let me know if you have an ideas (stingyscholar at gmail dot com).
Update -Why am I using del.icio.us instead of a blog service like Wordpress that features tagging? There are a couple of reasons. (Warning: geeky details to follow). There are certainly things that I don't like about Blogger: lack of tags, mysterious deleting drafts, no trackback, problems with javascripts, etc. Wordpress is a great program, but I often have trouble in IE, particularly with pictures. I've been able to use Blogger snag-free from every browser and OS. Since I don't always post at home, this is important. Plus, I like that I don't have to worry about bandwidth, or what will happen to old entries if I stop paying someone. Finally, at I'm used to Blogger's quirks and comfortable with the program. I could pay for hosting while still using the Blogger interface, but I'm stingy. And people are used to the blogspot site address, so why move it? I figure that if Blogger is good enough for the president-elect of Portugal, I shouldn't complain.
Additionally, del.icio.us is a resource for many people who want to find free educational materials, but don't know about Stingy Scholar or Textbook Revolution. Since the goal is to draw attention to these materials, I'm hoping that more people will discover them through these del.icio.us tags. Every Stingy Scholar bookmark is tagged with the tags: stingy, scholar, learning, free, and education. With del.icio.us, users can also save the bookmarks to their own account. They can also create RSS subscriptions for specific tags. For example, perhaps you don't care about science, but you like the posts on books. You can set your feed reader to receive: http://del.icio.us/rss/stingyscholar/booksOne final point - I choose to link to my posts rather than the direct site because it seemed more managable, especially since I update posts with many links such as this older one on University Podcasts.
2 comments:
You're a man after my own heart.
I too have been thinking about using delish to organize my near-400 posts. I'm forgetting what I've posted and search is not quite cutting it anymore.
Missouri Botanical Gardens gave me the idea actually. Through their illustratedgarden website they have a team of volunteers tagging (I think single) pages relating to their wealth of vintage/rare botanical books.
I note you're using a small set of tags and I wonder about that too. I'm still not sure what the ultimate aim is; whether to contribute to the social organizing with many tags or just simply arranging material for scan 'n' find.
I will have to think about it - I tend towards the former, using multitags because in my case I remember posts/material/authors by varying identities. eg. renaissance would have a ton of entries whereas author names will make search more exact. But then we have different material. Hmmmm....more thinking to be done.
[love your site - great idea and great material. Cheers!]
Thanks! I've been struggling with the same thing. There are two goals: (1) organize the site, (2) make the links available. I thought that lesser tags would organize the site better while still making the links available. If I went crazy with too many tags then del.icio.us would start to become too tough to navigate. Plus, now that the search engine is working better, I think that people will be able to find the stuff fairly easily. Also, since everything has the tags "education" "learning" and "free", the posts will probably pop up in random searches.
Glad you like the site!
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