Yes, ‘tagging’ is still an annoying piece of graffiti, but when it comes to Social Bookmarking, ‘tagging’ now has a far more useful application, in helping us organise, categorise, search, share and relocate web resources. Read about social bookmarking to find out more….
Delicious and Social Bookmarking
I have just started my first Delicious account! This is the most popular social bookmarking tool which allows you to store your bookmarks online. This is particularly handy for teachers, because instead of just storing your bookmarks on one computer (and one browser), they are stored online for you to access anytime, anywhere.
You can also chose to either share your bookmarks with others or keep your bookmarks private. This is great, because I really don’t want people to know about my lithop obsession, but I do want to share links to the great technology in education resources that I find.
You can form networks with family, friends, co-workers, other educators and students to view and share relevant bookmarks. You can also divide your contacts into ‘network bundles’ so that the websites your students are bookmarking, can be viewed seperately in your Delicious account to those that Aunt Betty is bookmarking.
Creating Bookmarks in Delicious
You can bookmark important websites in three ways:
- Use browser add-ons
- Use a bookmarlet – click ‘Bookmark on Delicious’ in your toolbar when you visit a page you want to bookmark
- Select ‘Save a new bookmark’ on the far right-hand-side of your Delicious account homepage
More information about each of these is detailed in the sign up process (Step 2).
Some webpages also have a built in bookmark link, like this blog post. Down the bottom of this post, you will see little links to Delicious and a couple of other popular bookmarking sites as well (Reddit, Digg, Technorati and Furi).
I also found it very useful that I could export the bookmarks that I had already, so none of my previous efforts were lost. This was very easily done when I signed up for the account (this is the third step when you sign up for a Delicious account, or it can be done later as well).
To help you find articles again, you can use ‘tags.’ A tag is a way of categorising the information that you are looking at. For example, when you read this post, you might give it the tags ’social.bookmarking’, ‘introductory’, ‘education’, ‘Web2.0′. These tags can be subjects, people, places, locations, names, ideas – virtually anything you might want to use to categorize information.
It becomes social, because other people can then search these tags and see the resources you tagged.
How is this relevant to education?
- Students can use Delicious to keep a record of all the internet resources they look at when undertaking a research task
- Students can share links with other students to resources that they find useful when researching a particular topic
- Teachers could use this professionally to share great resources with colleagues, whether they be on a topic or for a whole subject area
- When you meet innovative experts and professionals, you can share Delicious account details and keep up with what they are looking at.
Limitations
One of the limitations of Delicious is that bookmarks can only be marked public or private. This is a limitation for teachers that may not want to share bookmarked resources with everyone: for example, there may be essay topics or exams that a teacher may want to share with colleagues, but probably not their students. This limitation may be overcome by some of the other tools available, so I will be sure to keep you posted.
Nevertheless, be sure to tell us about your Delicious details if you are also interested in technology in education, by commenting on this post or emailing us.
Written by Callie Whelan.Melbourne Beyond Chalk Facilitator
