Clipping the Web

I have enjoyed and learned much from the online courses in which I have participated. I have appreciated being able to access the courses at times and places convenient for me. I like the fact that I can send communications to my instructors at whatever time works best for me… and my experience has been that they respond to me quickly.

I recently read an article in Education Week about online learning. I wasn’t interested in bookmarking the entire web page. However, there were a few quotations that I thought I’d like to keep for use in future discussions of the subject.

Clipmarks.com (http://clipmarks.com/) allows me to do just that… to save text clippings or even images and videos on a web page. So I clipped some comments that I wanted to keep and posted them to Delicious so I could access them later. I could also post them to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, iGoogle, or a Netvibes home page.

I can view my clipping on my Clipmarks page. If I choose to make my clippings public, I can view them on the public Clipmarks page. I can post them to my blog—several blogging platforms are supported—or email them to friends or print them. Here’s the clips I posted to this blog.

clipped from blogs.edweek.org One must have a level of maturity that usually only comes with chronological age to engage in such a responsibility. Overall, I found the experience GREAT! I believe it helped me to grow intellectually in the way of technological intelligence and in my abstract and critical thinking. But I don't miss at all the distractions, the unavoidable traffic and parking, the need to make an appointment with a professor who is only available 3-5 pm twice a week.

In order to use Clipmarks, I installed an extension for Firefox. Extensions are also available for Internet Explorer and Flock. To clip, I first click the green clip button. Then I highlight what I want and click the clip button to select it. When I have finished clipping, I click Done Clipping and choose what I am going to do with my clippings—save, blog, email, or print them.

I can follow someone by choosing him/her as a Guide. That way I can see what that individual clips.

I can place a widget of my clips to a MySpace page, blog, or other site. I chose to put a widget on my iGoogle page.

Why would I—or you—want to use Clipmarks? The testimonials listed on the Clipmarks page suggest these reasons:

• archive information
• store information that interests me
• stay up-to-date on a topic
• share ideas that I think are important
• clip and save part of a page
• clip and save text, graphics, and YouTube videos
• save directly to your blog
• e-mail something you just read to a friend

I particularly like the fact that I can save my clippings to Delicious. That way I can access the information I clipped to use it for future work. And the ease of posting clippings to my blog is useful. I haven’t succeeded in posting to my wiki automatically yet. I would like that!

I also like being able to save portions of a web page to my Delicious account. When I pull up the information later when I’m researching a particular topic, I won’t have to re-read the entire page to find the information I wanted to keep.