A lot of my online lectures, written as ordinary web pages, have links out to websites. Often these websites go down, or are unavailable, or have disappeared when students click. I have three online classes with about 15 lectures each, and most of them have links out, so I can’t keep up with all of them. Sometimes students are good about reporting downed links, and I can replace them with something else. Usually the something else isn’t as good as the page I originally wanted them to see!
So I’m going to try Furl. Furl is a social bookmarking site that archives the actual pages, caches them so that the old version is available. I just started today. It looks like when I Furl a website (which I can do with a browser button), I can tag it. Then when I see the list of my archived sites, I can click on the “F” symbol, and a window comes up asking which version I want to see. Right-clicking the “cached” gives me a URL, and I can use this to link to the archived version. (Since it’s social, I can also share the list of links, though I’m not quite sure who would care.)
I’m hoping this will prevent having to update links a lot, and will preserve those pages I wanted my students to use for reference, even if the sites themselves vanish. I understand it doesn’t cache whole sites, only pages, but usually it’s only the page I want, often because it has good images or a brief explanation of the concept in lecture.
It will, of course, take a long time, and the job strikes me as vaguely secretarial rather than instructional. I wonder….
