Delicious Social Bookmarking

Brilliant! How have I not heard of this before? What rock have I been living under?

"What a benefit it would be if one could see all the bookmarks that had been created by other, like-minded users" (Eastment, 2008, pp.217).

This is delicious!

Reflections on the process of learning about Social Bookmarking

Out of the many different social bookmarking sites, I decided to go with ‘Delicious’ as it seemed to be the fairly popular and fairly user friendly. You don’t even need to enter your e-mail address! How great is that?

I found the “Social Bookmarking” trailfire helpful to wrap my mind around this tool, especially the YouTube video. The possibilities of various uses personally and professionally began to swim in my mind.

Once I was signed up, I chose to import my bookmarks from my computer. However, I ended up deleting them all, as I ran into a few issues. One being that some of my bookmarks are to sites that no long exist (ie. an expired property listing for a huge loft downtown with exposed brick). Also, when I imported my bookmarks, all of the sites that Firefox and Mac include were also listed. So, I wound up with a ton of sites, and none of them were ‘tagged.’ The last issue was that some of bookmarks were sites that I didn’t want anyone to know I had bookmarked (ie. Miley Cyrus’s Official fan site). Hence, the cleanse! (Which, by the way, was a complicated process. I had to delete them ten at a time! Unless there’s an option I’ve missed). Now, I do know that you can ‘private’ some bookmarks, but I didn’t feel like sorting through the hundreds. Once I was free of everything, I began to bookmark once more, making sure to tag accurately.

Discussion of Social Bookmarking in terms of my own personal learning

Have you every started googling a topic you're interested in and soon become off on a tangent, surfing from useful to useless to mediocre sites. Well, with Delicious, I can simply type in a key word and I can come up with sites that others have checked out and decided were important/useful enough to bookmark! As Richardson (2000) puts it, we can "tap into the work of others to support our own learning" (pp.101)

When I'm interested in a certain topic, Delicious will help me to investigate the topic and keep me updated as to the latest writings on this topic. It's as if someone else is doing the googling/work/research for us!

I was curious about the potential drawbacks or weak points of social bookmarking. One negative point in using this is that it “means storing data in yet another location that you have to maintain and update.” (Bryant, 2005, pp.2). Another potential pitfall would be “inconsistent or otherwise poor use of tags" (Bryant, 2005, pp.2) Bryant uses the example of someone bookmarking a site on the breed of dog known as greyhound. If someone only tagged it with ‘greyhound’ and not ‘greyhound’ and ‘dog’ then there is going to be a mix up in terms of categories. One final potential pitfall is that the bookmarks “reflect the values of the community of users [and] there is a risk of presenting a skewed view of the value of any particular topic” (Bryant, 2005, pp.2)

I think this is would be a phenomenal tool to utilize while traveling, especially on extended trips where you don’t have access to your personal computer. For example, if you were backpacking across Europe and stopped in at an internet café, you could log into the social bookmarking site and see all of your links. You can cut down on your time spent online because everything you need will be a simple click away, and plus, you’ll have a reminder of what needs to be taken care of (ie. a payment, a pending reservation, etc).

Discussion of Social Bookmarking in terms of teaching & learning

The possibility to incorporate Social bookmarking into my teaching to help student learning is almost limitless. As mentioned in the YouTube clip, "Social Bookmarking in plain English" a teacher could collect sites associated with a unit of study (ie. Multiplication). This process will be made easier because of bookmarking other teachers have already done. Then, as the students progress through the unit they can access these sites to aide their learning.

When working from home, I often find sites that I would like to visit or would like my students to visit at school. I often email them to myself, or try to find them again by using google, which can be a bit of a pain. With Delicious, now I can just bookmark it at home and easily access it at school and share it.

The options for collaboration with teachers in your school, the district, the city and the entire world are endless. Our world is truly becoming global and well do they say it takes a village..

Works Cited

Bryant, T. (2005) 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking. www.educause.edu/eli

Eastment, Diana. (2008). ELT Journal Advance Access. pp.217-219

Richardson, W., (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. 2nd Ed. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA. pp. 89-98.