Newsvine

I've been thinking a lot about some of the "Web 2.0" community-based technologies, and frankly, I'm somewhat surprised that Newsvine doesn't often make the list of sites that are useful (educationally or otherwise). Newsvine strikes me as exponentially useful for thoughtful community building. And unlike Facebook and MySpace, which are both good for social stuff, Newsvine enables thoughtful conversation around topics that are easy to connect to educational content.

Newsvine, essentially, is the same as Digg but with less technology coverage (and a nicer interface, IMHO). It covers more general news in addition to its technology offerings. The entire AP wire is up there, in addition to articles from other news sources seeded (i.e., posted) by members. Members can also write their own articles. Members tag their seeds or original articles, which then become searchable and commentable. Voting on a story pushes it "up the vine," thus increasing its "vineacity." Their metaphors, not mine. :-)

I've created a special account for the College of IST here at Penn State so that I can use it to enable faculty to enhance course content with current news articles. For example, an instructor in our security and risk analysis major can tag news articles about identity theft with an "ist" tag, and students anywhere in the PSU system (or outside it, for that matter) can find them by entering the URL for the IST account followed by the tag. The URL http://ist.newsvine.com/ist451 will give you all the articles written or seeded with an "ist451" tag.

Students who have accounts on Newsvine can then vote on the stories, comment on them, or write their own posts in response, which in turn can also be commented on. I envision all the students enrolled in the same course across multiple campuses then being able to interact with each other and create a larger community that's still on-topic and theoretically "within the course."

Pretty cool, huh?