Social bookmarking is “del.icio.us”!
Written on November 17, 2006 – 9:37 am | by Ed Warkentin
The following is an article that appeared in the newsletter of Central Valley Computer Using Educators (CVCUE). Please comment here if you find any other tips or advice on how to use del.icio.us, whether you’re talking about technical things that can be done with it, or new ways to use it with colleagues and communities!
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Rather than just save bookmarks/favorites only to your hard drive, let me introduce you to social bookmarking. The two most common sites for this are http://del.icio.us/ and http://www.furl.net/. I’ll describe del.ico.us here.
Here’s HOW to get started: Get a free account and put the “post to del.icio.us” link on your bookmarks bar. Then, when you’re surfing the web, and come across a site you want to save, click the “post to del.icio.us” bookmark, and you will be able to “tag” the site with whatever words you want to categorize this site with.
Here’s WHY you should get started: Most of you reading this are probably in some sort of leadership position among your colleagues, whether formally or informally. Instead of having to send people a list of URL’s in an email when you want to share something with them, you can keep adding URL’s to your del.icio.us account, and then send a single URL when the time comes to share. For example, if I want to give someone some sites about blogging in the classroom, I can just give them this URL: http://del.icio.us/wark/Blogging101/, and they can access a whole list of sites that I recommend for this category, or on my entire account (http://del.icio.us/wark). They will also be able to see which sites you add to that category later. (You can also save sites as private, in case you only want to access them yourself, and not share them with the world.)
Another example is one that I have created a del.icio.us account specifically for sharing websites to assist 6th grade math teachers (http://del.icio.us/math34/). I have also tagged sites on this account to align with the chapters in the McDougal-Littel math textbook. Part of the reason for creating a separate account has to do with “bundles”, which are kind of like folders for bookmarks, but that’s for another article. I have discussed this, other tech tips, and other topics on my blog (http://ewarkentin.edublogs.org/). Go there to learn more about recommending sites for others’ del.icio.us accounts, to learn about putting sites into bundles, and to leave comments about tips that you discover beyond what I’ve described here!
For even more information on social bookmarking, I recommend Will Richardson’s book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasting, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.
Tags: del.icio.us
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