Thing 17: Social Bookmarking with Del.icio.us

The focus of this lesson is Del.icio.us! Although you might feel that this activity is indeed tasty...Del.icio.us is actually the name of a social bookmarking manager site that lets you save links to your favorite websites to a central location and classify them with "tags" for more robust searching capabilities. (We will discuss tags in more detail during the next task). The great thing about online social bookmarking is that it greatly eases the burden of storing all of your favorite websites on just one computer. With Del.icio.us you can access your bookmarks from any location!

Many users find that the real power of Del.icio.us is in the social network aspect, which allows you to see how other users have categorized the subject content of a particular website and also discover the websites that are bookmarked by the most people. You can think of it as peering into other users’ filing cabinets, but with this powerful bookmarking tool each user's filing cabinet helps to build an expansive knowledge network.

Del.icio.us even offers RSS feeds - you can create a shared bookmark site and receive news every time a new link is added under that subject heading. What a great way to keep track of new and interesting websites for any topic of interest.

For this activitity, you are asked to take a look at Del.icio.us and learn about this popular bookmarking tool.

Discovery Resources:

• Watch the Social Bookmarking in Plain English (3.25 min. video)
• Us.ef.ul: A beginners guide to the Next Big Thing
• Keeping Citations Straight, and Finding New Ones (an article about CiteULike, a similar bookmarking site for scholarly articles)
  

Discovery Activities:

1. Watch and read the provided Discovery Resources on social bookmarking.

2. Take a look around del.icio.us by checking out some the websites I have bookmarked in my account. You will notice even notice links to some of the articles I have saved to use for the MCPV Learning 2.0 program. (I still have some organizing to do, which we will talk about in the next segment).

3. Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about using this tool. Possible topics: Can you see the potential of this tool for sharing online resources with students? Or just an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere?

Bonus: Register for your own Del.icio.us account and start bookmarking & tagging your favorite websites.