Rip. Mix. Feed.
Bundlr site: http://bundlr.com/b/etec-540
First off, I need to be as efficient as I can so I decided to use this activity as an opportunity to springboard into the Multimedia assignment. I needed to collect my research – I have used Diigo and Delicious before, and in keeping with Kress and Bolter’s ideas around the visual, I wanted to try Webslides. However, I was unable to locate the app (maybe defunct?). So I surfed around for an alternative, and I became reacquainted Bundlr.
Bundlr is also a social bookmarklet/web curation tool, but it takes on a bit more of a visual appeal. Links are presented as tiles on the screen. It accepts any kind of content: articles, photos, videos, tweets, quotes and links. You can receive news articles from your selected sources. There is also a downloadable browser button…click to “clip” the content while you browse. You can share a link to your bundlr page or embed on any website. Other collaborators can be invited to contribute as well. Bundlr is available for: Android, iPhone, iPod touch and Web and it can be linked to your facebook, Google and Twitter profiles. This aids in connecting to your social network/friends and in supporting your online identity (boyd, 2007). As in Alexander (2008), microcontent and social connections are made and exploited based on the interests, needs, and abilities of the contributors. The only way to create a private bundlr site is to pay for the upgrade.
I like the visual representation of the links, and the ease in which the link is created. You can open the clip and add your own observations/notes to the tile. The “like” feature could be useful…the collaborators or viewers could use “like” to rate the articles and their importance. A rating scale would be even more useful to this end! Headings can be edited to your own preference and quickly skimmed to determine relevance and significance.
Some affordances I would have liked to have seen would be to select my own order in which the links appear. Unfortunately, you are limited to arranging by date of clipping. I also noticed that some clips provide the full text, and others only a partial (you still need to click again to access the full article). One missing affordance would be having the ability to upload your own content directly to your bundle or to create your own content directly into the tool. At present, it has to be content that is already on the web somewhere else.
As a user that demands immediacy and transparency (Bolter, 2001) and multimodalities (Kress, 2005) this offers me quite a bit of agency and adaptability. I am certainly an advocate of social learning and knowledge construction, and of empowering the learner/viewer. After reading Frieson & Lowe (2012) and Alexander (2008), I can no longer ignore the commercial aspects of these tools. After linking my facebook and Google + account to Bundlr, what information will be shared? How will they track my activity? It seems Bundlr is harmless…but is it really behind the scenes?
References
Alexander, B. (2008) Web 2.0 and Emergent Multiliteracies, Theory Into Practice, 47:2, 150-160, DOI: 10.1080/00405840801992371.
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
boyd, danah. (2007) “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge and learning. Computers and Composition, 22(1), 5-22.
Friesen, N. & Lowe, S. (2011). The questionable promise of social media for education: connective learning and the commercial imperative. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 28, 183–194. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2011.00426.x