As much as I hate to admit it, social bookmarking is a concept that is pretty new to me. Not that the idea of bookmarking websites is new. I figured out that feature pretty quickly, never having been one to remember things if the computer could remember for me, or one to write things down if I could find a way to make the computer write it for me. So, I quickly found the bookmarking feature of my favorite web browser. Yes, the list got kind of long, but I managed to wade through it and find what I needed. And yes, sometimes I would be in a colleague’s office and would not be able to access my bookmarks, but generally speaking, I was pretty happy with this function.
Sharing bookmarks is also not a new concept to me. I used to jot them down for friends, or send them out in an email as a link. That worked pretty well. But I was always working around the little problems…bookmarks only saved on the computer where you made the bookmark, so if you were a computer nomad, like I am, you only have access to your bookmarks part of the time. Organization depends upon your ability to project your future needs – what folder should I put this link in? What if it belongs in multiple folders? Social bookmarking comes to the rescue!
Like any good superhero, social bookmarking services, like Delicious, are not one-dimensional figures. There is more to them than meets the eye. Not only will Delicious organize and search my bookmarks with an almost limitless number of tags, but it also allows me to search through sites that others have bookmarked and shared. This becomes a powerful research tool for both student and teacher alike. Guldi (2007) had the fabulous idea of using “dissertation” as one of her tags. Every article, picture, PDF, movie, etc. that she came across that had to do with her dissertation, was tagged with this tag; instantly searchable. Further tags placed it in whatever category within the dissertation that the information occupied. The added benefit of being able to add a description, then creates a list of items that has information that she, personally found important about that item. This is very applicable to the research I am doing for my Action Research project. Guldi (2007) has also formed a small group with which she shares research information. Many of these folks she has never met, but “stumbled” across through shared use of some arcane tags.
Carvin (2006) goes a bit further with the social part of social bookmarking. He keeps a link to Delicious on his blog, and encourages readers to bookmark anything they find that they think we be of interest to his readership with the learning.now bookmark that populates the blog link box. Carvin has turned over control of his list of links to his readers, embracing the read-write web and further removing barriers between “experts” and “learners”. Carvin’s idea could be used as a means of getting buy-in from students when we ask them to do research. It would feel more like purposeful work, rather than busy-work.
One of the functions that Kristi (2009) points out is the ability to form networks in Delicious. As a class assignment, I could send students to the web to research various aspects of a topic, and share their research findings with each other within the network. Each student could then prepare his/her own final product, but with less time spent trying to gather the information. In addition, this process would introduce them to some of the uses of delicious.
Carvin, A. (2006, May). Tag - You’re Delicious! PBS Teachers. http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2006/05/tag_youre_delicious.html
Guldi, J. (2007, March). How delicious is changing academic research. http://landscape.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-delicious-is-changing-academic.html
Kristi. (2009, April). 8 Reasons to use Delicious for social bookmarking. Social Media. http://kikolani.com/8-reasons-delicious-social-bookmarking.html
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