Linking knowledge worldwide

The title of a new Nuffic brochure "Linking knowledge worldwide" somehow stuck in my mind today. I began to realise that has been the driving force for me in quite a number of projects that I have been working on in the last few years. Now I know that I should add "by social media" or "by web 2.0 tools".
Let's go back a little.... Around 1999 I got involved in an international project that ran under the Dutch Scandinavian Cooperation consortium. With 2 partners from the Netherlands and 2 from Bergen (HIB), Norway we developed a course for lecturers in higher education that revolved around the idea of collaborative learning in distance education. The results are still available on the web. While working on the project I discovered that my interest in internationalisation could be enhanced by developments that were taking place on the web. There and then a keen interest in all things digital arose. From then on, it became clear to me that these two tracks in my professional development could reinforce each other in a big way.
Not quite by coincidence but definitely not on purpose either, I started out bookmarking sites on delicious in October 2006. I regularly worked on 3 different computers and repeatedly asked myself where I could find that particular favourite I stored a number of days earlier. Fed up with the situation I decided to take the jump and store them on the web, easy for reference wherever I was. Soon after however I started to become aware of the enormous potential of the network I had got involved in. I'm still thankful for the experiment that it was for me at the time, because now it's proved to be such a valuable resource for me in so many of the activities I'm involved in at the moment.
Today it crossed my mind that I can also utilise delicious in and for the new INTERISO working group that started up last September. Simply by adding the tag interiso for all the relevant sites I'm bookmarking as I go along I can build up relevant resources for all the international coordinators of our school of social work. Possibly, I could even seduce them into using this social bookmarking tool to their own advantage, within their own field of expertise.....
Another interesting social media tool is naturally flickr.com. I've already introduced this as a communication tool in a European Grundtvig project, but for all kinds of international plans and projects this is a real joy to explore and use. In other words, the current social media tools are ideal springboards for linking cultures, continents and knowledge worldwide. The possibilities are limitless. It just needs openminded and creative people to get it going and turn it into a success.