Digital Literacy 09: Social Bookmarks
The second topic in our 7th grade Digital Literacy course was social bookmarking. Tools like Delicious provide several advantages over saving bookmarks in a browser, including the ability to access your links from any computer, easily share bookmarks, and perform tag searches to see which sites others have saved. For those unfamiliar with these concepts, this classic clip from Common Craft provides a nice overview:
For Middle School students, mastering the art of tagging (i.e. choosing keywords wisely) and managing the social aspects of bookmarking (i.e. building a useful network) can be challenging. Social tagging and folksonomy dominate the web, and John Falls’ The Practical Guide to Content Tagging in Social Bookmarking suggests that users should keep it simple, keep it the same, periodically review, and don’t bookmark everything. Developing an effective network is a formitable task but one that students can achieve over time; many have social connections through Twitter and/or Facebook that can be leveraged for learning, and networking with classmates and teachers is an easy entry point.
There is more to Delicious than most realize, and resources abound for new and veteran users. The Huge List of Delicious Tools, Plugin, Scripts and Mashable’s Delicious Toolbox: 80+ Updates Tools and Resources can help anyone make better use of this versatile tool. A few of my favorites include Tasty for the iPhone, Fresh Delicious for checking broken links, and Delicer (terrible name-wonderful tool) for account management. Delicious really does make bookmarking more useful and fun; if you haven’t yet explored its potential, I would encourage you to create an account and see what you’ve been missing!
