In my last two posts I discussed how reading education blogs and participating in Twitter can help teachers “get connected”. To continue that theme, today I will focus on del.icio.us, a well established social bookmarking/social networking tool. For those new to del.icio.us and/or the concept of social bookmarking, this short clip from CommonCraft provides a very nice overview:

Social bookmarking offers a completely restructured approach to information management. As noted in the video, its three key components are (1) storing bookmarks on the web instead of on a local computer, (2) classifying sites with searchable tags instead of within file folders, and (3) the ability to easily share information with others. What are the practical implications of such a paradigm? The article 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking from Educause provides a clarifying scenario:

Professor Smith does much of his work on the Web these days. He uses folders in his Web browser to organize bookmarks of online resources, but this practice has become inefficient. If a resource is relevant to several topic areas, he has to save that bookmark in multiple folders. At times he will discover that his essential bookmarks are on his home machine while he is at the office. Other times he is fairly confident that the bookmarked site is on his machine, but the process of finding one site out of hundreds of bookmarks is more difficult than refinding it using Google. Often Dr. Smith needs to share bookmarks with students and colleagues; this task requires finding the reference and e-mailing it.

Dr. Brown has all of the same needs as Dr. Smith but uses del.icio.us to manage her bookmarks. When Dr. Brown finds a Web site to bookmark, she “right clicks” the site to add it to her del.icio.us account and “tags” it with a few relevant keywords. Since her list is public, she can easily direct colleagues and students to it. Others can find the list through the keywords.

Dr. Brown has a few other advantages as well. When she bookmarks a site, del.icio.us tells her how many others bookmarked the same site. If she clicks on that number, she can see exactly who else bookmarked the site and when they found it. A further click shows her the bookmark collections of others interested in “her” site. Finally, if she chooses a common tag, Dr. Brown can see all of the other sites with that tag. This makes group collection and aggregation of bookmarks very easy.

Although the scenario is fictitious, it should resonate with any educator who wants to utilize the Web effectively and leverage the advantages of social networking.

Get Social

While there are tremendous benefits to tagging and saving bookmarks online, the often-overlooked social networking aspects of del.icio.us are very powerful. How many times have you sent or received an email from someone that contained a website “you might enjoy”? With a del.icio.us network, that must-see site can be shared with the click of a button.

In del.icio.us, your network connects you to other del.icio.us users. When you add someone to your network, you can save a site for them by adding their username as a tag. For example:

When the site/tag is saved it will appear in my bookmarks and in my friend’s links for you list. My friend can then check out what I’ve saved for her, decide if she wants to keep it, and add her own tags so that it is organized in a meaningful way. Sharing doesn’t get much easier than that.

The social aspects of del.icio.us can be used even without a personal network. As described on the del.icio.us help page, “The subscriptions feature allows you to watch all your favorite tags in one place. After you add a tag to your subscriptions, del.icio.us watches for everyone’s bookmarks saved with that tag and delivers them to your subscriptions page. It’s a tag aggregator, good for watching what people are bookmarking about a favorite topic (or a bunch of them). ” I have found subscriptions to be an invaluable research tool; seeing what other people have saved (and how many of them saved it) can be more effective than starting from scratch with Google.

Start Tagging

If you have never experienced del.icio.us before, or perhaps have not explored its social networking potential, I would encourage you to give it a try. Although it is quite simple to use, this post is by no means a tutorial and I would encourage you to contact me, utilize the del.icio.us online help menu, or refer to this cheat sheet from Joe Barker for more information. In the meantime, create your account, feel free to add me to your network and then start tagging!

Posted: 01|10|08 at 3:37 pm. Filed under: Professional Development, Social Networks.
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