Once again I am slapping myself (figuratively) on the forehead for realising what I have been missing out on as I have noticed the strange group of icons (including Delicious) at the bottom of webpages, but never bothering to find out the reason for their presence. Now I know…and I wish I had known before now. My problem is that I will often bookmark a site if I have seen something that looks interesting or if I think, “I may come back and use that sometime.” As a result I now have, in two different browsers, long lists of bookmarks that include a title and not much else. I have tried to group them according to year group or subject etc in the bookmarks menu in the browser, but every so often I have to go through and have a purge. This involves me spending a reasonable amount of time checking each site in the list, trying to remember why I bookmarked it in the first place and then thinking whether I want to keep it or not. Then I have different bookmarks for different browsers and different ones on the computer at work. So, bookmarking on Delicious makes a lot more sense for me. All I have to do now is begin the slow, gradual process of transferring all my bookmarks over and adding tags to them.
Even in the process of thinking of tags to apply, I came across new sites sharing a common tag. Some people seem to have an issue with making their list of bookmarks public, but I have been glad to be able to get fresh ideas and resources already, thanks to picking up a site that someone else has tagged for me. I hope my tagging comes in useful for others in the same way.
I like the fact that now, in Delicious, each site has tags attached to it, so I save time by not having to remember what it was about the site that prompted me to bookmark it in the first place. I like the fact that I can add a whole range of tags for the same site – very often, with web searches, you can get vastly different results depending on the specific word, or combination of words, you use for the search. Tagging with multiple words should broaden the net.
As far as using Delicious to help students learn, I would like to see students collaborate by sharing their own useful links – it should cut down the amount of time they spend searching for useful sites and hopefully they will then use this time to actually read the information on the sites (rather than just copy/pasting!). It would be good to link Delicious with e.g. a wiki, where the Delicious page could act as a resource page for sites I want them all to be able to access in order to start off work on their wiki. This would enable me to ensure they were starting off with material at a suitable level for them and hopefully, again, prevent them just copy/pasting material they think looks and sounds relevant, but that they don’t fully understand.
My embryonic Delicious site is here.
1 response so far ↓
1
Shelley
// Nov 1, 2008 at 11:22 am
Unsolicited suggestion — “tear the bandaid” as it were and import all your bookmarks from all computers and browsers, then do the tagging and culling over time via delicious. Just do a quick pre-emptive check in case there’s anything you would want to “unshare” from the mass upload — easy enough to do — I have only a few of those and I give them a special tag (along with any other tags) to keep them easily accessed, and make sure to check the “do not share” box. The main way I use that feature is to give myself hints in the description box about usernames and passwords (I don’t put the actual password, just a hint that would jog my memory). Unshared stuff is only seen by you when you are logged in. Then you can just tidy-up a few sites a day until the chore is done.
Side note — your initial foray into tagging is so impressive! The effort know will pay off hugely over time!
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