Tips by Tony

In case you hadn’t heard, Yahoo! will be shutting down Delicious bookmarks (previously known as de.licio.us), which it had purchased in December 2005. The entire Delicious staff was laid off yesterday. Here’s what you need to know:

Export your Delicious bookmarks

If, like many people, you’ve come to rely on the power and convenience of Delicious to manage your bookmarks, don’t panic. The first thing you’re going to want to do is export your bookmarks from Delicious. Here’s how:

• Log in to Delicious, then click the Settings link in the upper right corner of the page.
• Under the Bookmarks heading, click Export/Backup Bookmarks.
• Now, you can choose to include tags and/or notes, and export all your bookmarks or only those with certain tags. It’s probably best to export all your bookmarks, so just leave everything as the default then click the Export button.
• A file will now be downloaded to wherever your web browser downloads files.

Importing your bookmarks into another service or web browser

Many people have started using Diigo as an alternative to Delicious. The good news is Diigo can import your Delicious bookmarks from the export file you just downloaded, or by entering your Delicious username and password directly. Here’s how to import your Delicious bookmarks into Diigo:

• Log in to Diigo, then click the Tools link in the upper right corner of the page.
• Click the “more tools” link in the left-hand menu, then click Import Bookmarks.
• On the Import Bookmarks page, click the Delicious icon.
• Now you can either import using the bookmark file that you exported from Delicious, or enter your Delicious username and password to import directly from Delicious.

If you’d prefer to import your Delicious bookmarks into a web browser, here’s an article explaining how. Note that you would need to do this for every browser you use on every computer you use, and you’d no longer have access to your bookmark over the Internet (from someone else’s computer) like you do with Diigo.

Nathan Hale High School in Seattle recently caved to the uninformed pressure of a single parent, removing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World from the curriculum. Sadly, this is not an isolated incident.

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A few “quick hit” articles that I’ve read recently regarding education and/or educational technology.

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Interactive Fiction (IF) is a type of story where the player uses text commands to control the main character and influence the environment, and is often used to refer to text adventures. IF can be used to simulate an historical event or location, or to create an entirely new fictional environment.

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We hear a lot these days about digital textbooks, but most examples I’ve seen are nothing more than digitized versions of the printed copy. While electronic versions of textbooks make your backpack much lighter, and provide the ability to search, what’s really needed is a complete re-thinking of how the content is provided. A new company named Inkling is taking the first step.

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