Here’s how it will work: Post comments on what you would do to respond. Occasionally, I’ll post an update with new information that may change your choices.

So here’s the setting: Let’s go out on a limb and say the East Coast is devastated by an earthquake. (That should get you out of your comfort zone – I mean, *everyone* knows what to do in a hurricane, right?) Let’s assume that by some miracle, no one is critically injured, although almost everyone has minor scrapes or cuts or bruises.

DAY ONE: Everyone’s house has sustained enough structural damage to make it safe to enter to retrieve items but unsafe to spend any time inside. Electricity is out. Cell phone towers are down. Water isn’t working. We’ll assume you were able to turn off the gas (if any) to your house in the moments after the quake, and now there’s no natural gas flowing anyway. The nearest grocery store collapsed. No electricity, so no way to pump the gasoline out of the tanks at the few gas stations that survived. Police, first responders and hospitals are overwhelmed (interesting sidebar for Smitty and Joe – where’s the line between duty and family responsibility in this case?).

What are your first steps?

Once you have secured your family, do you reach out to your community? Does the Hampton Roads crew gather together, or are you too geographically spread out?

Day one is a pretty easy exercise. But what about Day three? Day seven?

When the National Guard comes through and tells you there’s a camp inland set up to receive refugees, please get in the back of the truck and we’ll take you there – do you?

But the real value add of Delicious and other social bookmarking sites is the use of tags to sort and categorize your bookmarks. Tags are metadata added to your saved favorites that will aid retreival of this bit of information. With this metadata, we use a word or phrase to describe the subject of a link for the purposes of retrieval and grouping.

For instance, when I add this excellent blog post on innovative instructional design to my Delicious account, I add tags like “e-learning” and “instructional_design” and “innovative” to the link. Later, when I am looking for information on innovative instructional design techniques, I can open my Delicious account and search for tags. So I would search for “innovative” and “instructional design.” The results of the search would display all of my saved links that include those tags. To add to the value, I can search all of Delicious for “innovative” and “instructional design” and find a list of links that every Delicious user has tagged with those keywords.

This leads to another web 2.0 technique called a Folksonomy, which is an aggregation of many users’ tags. In this respect, the “wisdom of the crowd” emerges. This is the phenomenom that made Amazon the internet retail powerhouse it is today. Read about it on the links above and blog about your thoughts on tagging and folksonomies.

Twitter users are struggling with the basic relevancy of microblogging. The hype surrounding Twitter over the last couple of months will not help people understand how sharing 140 characters at a time makes their lives better. As learning professionals working to understand Learning 2.0 tools, this is one of the challenges we face : is Twitter relevant? Can we use it to further learning and education? Tony Karrer is struggling with that question as well.

As a means of reaching out to a formal social network, Twitter finds a sweet spot. Need an answer to a question? Send a tweet to your network and sit back while the collective wisdom of your crowd rolls in. But building that formal social network and knowing how to plumb it for answers is a learned behavior that is a step beyond just signing up for a Twitter account.  If you are considering adding Twitter to your Learning 2.0 toolkit, some sort of user support in both social network building and Twitter etiquette are important content objects.

My advice: build that habit I mentioned. Make it a ritual to sit down with your morning coffee and your RSS reader and spend five or ten minutes each morning browsing the new posts. Some days you’ll need less time than others, but every day will probably bring new content in one form or another. And if not, that’s a good sign you need to expand your feed base! Your brain will thank you for the exercise.

Fort Scott Park

Originally uploaded by Kevin Borland

Here’s an example of blogging about a picture you find on Flickr. In this case, I am working with my neighborhood association to build a website. This is a picture of a park in the neighborhood, and I would like to use it for the header of the main web page. Of course, I will need to give the photographer credit for his work — thanks Kevin Borland!

Stay tuned as I blog more about the images I am posting.

In the meantime, as you get your blog up and running consider the utility of a blog for a student in a class. Obviously, a blog is overkill if your learning event is a one-day affair. But for learning interventions that stretch over multiple days or weeks, a blog become more viable. And if you would like to give students a chance to extend their learning beyond the classroom, a blog is certainly an option.

We will use our blogs over the next eight weeks to discuss the steps of the 23 Things.