Rediscovering Playlists…

Yesterday, I had a quick peek at the beta version of SocialLearn (currently open to OU staff, at least…). A key feature of the site are “learning paths”, ordered sets of annotated resources with associated progress status indicators:

I haven’t yet had a proper play with the site yet, so a will hold off a review of the site just for now, but my first glimpse reaction to that feature was: “isn’t that what H2O Playlists did?”

(I thought I must have posted some sort of review of H20 Playlists, “shared list[s] of readings and other content about a topic of intellectual interest”, but it seems I only made passing mention of them. However, I do remember creating several H2O playlists as a way of curating links associated with several presentations I gave when I was trying to advocate the use of social bookmarking in education. (For a review of H20 Playlists posted elsewhere around the same time, see More on H20 Playlist as a Social Bookmarking Tool for Business.)

Hmmm.. it seems I misremembered: you couldn’t check off progress on the playlist items, though you could save items off one list onto your own playlist, and you could also discover “related lists” that shared some of the same items.

Also yesterday, I came across the BBC Food Recipe Binder site:

This site lets you save, and annotate, recipes on the BBC Food site to a personal “Recipe Binder” page from an on-page call to action button.

(Okay, so the Recipe Binder isn’t a playlist, but it is an example of embedded bookmarking/personal curation of web resources…)

And then, today, I fire up my feeds to see all sorts of chatter about the delicious website redesign, a key feature of which appears to be… stacks (aka playlists:

The mechanics for putting together the playlists still seem a bit clunky (do I really need to add three links to create a new playlist?) but I guess it’s still early days… Anyway, here’s my first playlist stack: Crafty Stats…

Suddenly, it seems like 2005 again…