A website called Delicious?!? Yum, I’m thinking cupcakes, lots of beautifully decorated cupcakes. These mini cakes are all the rage and a Delicious website can only mean one thing – pictures, recipes, icing tips, and trading extravaganzas! Right?!? Wrong! This website, much to my dismay, has nothing to do with cupcakes or the culinary arts for that matter. Secretly (ok now not so secretly) I am disappointed, very, very disappointed. But alas – this website does have much to dish-up, in the form of social bookmarking. In fact it has even filled my appetite in terms of being an extremely useful web 2.0 technology. Follow this juicy post to find out what Delicious is about and how it can potentially fill ones personal and professional life with a dollop of icing on a little cake to share with one or two or over a hundred of your closest friends.
Reflections on Learning to Taste Something Delicious
Through casual conversations and the like, you’ve probably caught the pleasant aroma of names pertaining to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Diigo, Reddit, Digg, and Furl, but you may not really know what they are or what they’re used for. Social Bookmarking sites allow the user to have an online storage site that saves links for future use, by using unique key words or ‘tags’ to describe the site and then categorize and organize them (Richardson, 2009 http://www.amazon.com/Blogs-Wikis-Podcasts-Powerful-Classrooms/dp/1412959721/ref=ed_oe_p). Similar to other web 2.0 dishes, social bookmarking sites also allow the user to share their bookmarks with others. According to eBizMBA (http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking-websites), Delicious (http://delicious.com/) is one of the most recognized flavours of the many social bookmarking sites. Like a favourite family recipe, Delicious is easy to join and has user-friendly steps that direct you to begin using the site to its maximum potential. In the time it takes to boil an egg, I was able to add 5 bookmarks, with scrumptious descriptions and tag words for each site. Bite into my first social bookmarking attempt at http://delicious.com/Canadanz to see my tastiest bookmarks.
There are many handy features that cater to a user’s Delicious experience. To begin with, bookmarks can be added to the site either by copying and pasting the URL or by adding and clicking on the icons that users have the option of attaching to their tool bar. Both methods introduce you to a screen where the URL is displayed along with the title of the site, a note section to remind yourself about any pertinent information pertaining to the site (limited to 1000 characters), an area for tags, the choice of making it public or private, and lastly a place to list users who you may want to send the site to. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perception, the note section can only be seen by the account holder. Users concoct their own list of tags to describe each bookmark and are provided with some guidance by Delicious, as they dish-up a list of popular tag words that other users have attached to the same site. These tags are then added to your personal list of tags where they are ranked in two ways – first with a top ten list of your most used tags and then alphabetically, with the number of times it has been used next to it. Tagging can become a bit of a problem when different users, each with their own perspective, place a spectrum of different tags to the same site – so users should take these tag labels with a grain of salt. To address this situation the term folksonomies was whipped up by Thomas Vander Wal to “describe the type of collaborative categorization that becomes possible when collective categories are created by the general population” (Haworth & Frank, 2008 http://design.test.olt.ubc.ca/Del.icio.us_and_Educational_Social_Bookmarking). Delicious makes it easy to search for sites that have a specific tag attached to them via URLs (just add your tag word to the end of the URL like this: http://delicious.com/tag/yourtagwordhere) or by clicking on the tag in the provided tag cloud.
Users’ bookmarks are organized according to the date they were added or alphabetically and can be displayed in three view formats: title, regular view and full view. All three views display the number of other users that have bookmarked the same site and the edit/delete options. Delicious also allows you to see the most popular bookmarks and the most recent bookmarks that people have added to the site, which aids in the ease of connecting with others. With the click of a mouse, users can add a user to their network and/or add them to their subscriptions, which is why this web 2.0 tool is easy to gorge yourself on.
Delicious – For my own Personal Learning Palate
Delicious is a web 2.0 technology that I plan on feasting on for as long as there is a buffet of websites available. In fact, Delicious is the answer to a little research problem that I’ve been having… let me explain! Have you ever been in a situation where you’re searching for something specific and in the process of looking for the information you follow link after link through a ridiculous number of websites? Then when you locate your tasty piece of information you realize that you’ve just seen a lot of other really appetizing information and now you have no idea how to efficiently find it again? Social bookmaking is the solution to this burning problem! With Delicious all I have to do is click on my bookmarking icon and save the link with delectable tags that will enable me to quickly access it when I need it. Although, I really enjoy the ability of saving my favourite websites in one location (I previously copied the link to a word document – stone age, I know), I’m not so sure the tagging system is the most efficient way to organize information. At present I have approximately 15 bookmarks and 80ish tag words and, even when compared to Will Richardson (http://delicious.com/willrich) who has over 2500 bookmarks and almost 700 tags, this is still a lot of tags. The situation that I’ve run into is two fold: First I didn’t realize that terms with two or more words are typically attached by an underscore, as in language_arts, and secondly when I began adding bookmarks I was conservative in the number of tags that I gave them. Now that I’m more experienced with Delicious, specifically with my networks and subscriptions, I realize that I may need to go back and edit my bookmarks from time-to-time to ensure that I’ve used the most appropriate tags, both for myself and for others to access them. This could be time consuming.
My favourite part of this Delicious meal is that I have a market full of potentially useful websites that people I trust have hand selected and in an almost infinite number of websites – this may direct me to the juiciest websites available. I also enjoy the option of using the RSS feed button for any of the tags that are of particular interest to me. On-the-other-hand, my biggest beef about Delicious is its appearance; it is not going to win an award for its mouth-watering presentation. Although it is uncluttered and free of advertising, the colours are drab and it doesn’t come across as flashy or as exciting as some of the other web 2.0 tools and I don’t feel as if my Delicious account is as personalized as I would like it to be. Considering the information overload that many people are suffering from, internet addiction has even become a recognized mental health issue (http://www.netaddiction.com/whatis.htm), Delicious may in fact be doing its users a favour. I’m fine with this, but still wish that it used its namesake in a more culinary expressive format… at least it would make me want to visit it more often! One other tiny complaint that I have is that the notes are only accessible to the user, when it may be beneficial to understand why my network friends thought a site was worthy of bookmarking. Regardless, I look forward to convincing my friends and family to set up an account, so that we can begin sharing websites of personal interest.
Delicious – for my Professional Learning Taste Buds
As I began to experience the exciting menu of web 2.0 technologies I briefly asked my colleagues if they were social bookmarking regulars. Amongst the many confused looking faces, I was lucky enough to find two teachers who were both Delicious users. When asked how they use their Delicious accounts, it was discovered that they learned about social bookmarking at the 2009 GETCA Teachers’ Convention (http://www.getca.com/) and primarily used them professionally. One of the teachers works with grade 3 and 4 students who have special needs and he found that Delicious helped his students who had difficulty accurately typing long URLs. Instead of deliberating over the exactness of a URL he simply has his students go to his Delicious home page and access the necessary sites from this one page. He also said that it prevented them from aimlessly searching on the internet, locating information that they generally had difficulty reading and prevented them from accessing inappropriate sites, as he could hand select sites that would meet their specific learning needs. Another way of using Delicious with our students would be to have a class account or individual accounts where the students would have the opportunity to share their bookmarks with each other. This could be a smash hit for collaborative projects (Richardson, 2009 http://www.amazon.com/Blogs-Wikis-Podcasts-Powerful-Classrooms/dp/1412959721/ref=ed_oe_p). Of course if you teach older students you may want to use your bookmarks (along with RSS feeds) to draw your students’ attention to class readings or the freshest sites (Hedreen, 2005 http://frequanq.blogspot.com/2005/02/social-bookmarking-in-education.html).
In addition to sharing our bookmarks with our students we can also dish them out to our colleagues. This may bubble-up into some of the following benefits, as suggested on the CR2.0 wiki (http://wiki.classroom20.com/Social+Bookmarking):
Reflections on Learning to Taste Something Delicious
Through casual conversations and the like, you’ve probably caught the pleasant aroma of names pertaining to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Diigo, Reddit, Digg, and Furl, but you may not really know what they are or what they’re used for. Social Bookmarking sites allow the user to have an online storage site that saves links for future use, by using unique key words or ‘tags’ to describe the site and then categorize and organize them (Richardson, 2009 http://www.amazon.com/Blogs-Wikis-Podcasts-Powerful-Classrooms/dp/1412959721/ref=ed_oe_p). Similar to other web 2.0 dishes, social bookmarking sites also allow the user to share their bookmarks with others. According to eBizMBA (http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking-websites), Delicious (http://delicious.com/) is one of the most recognized flavours of the many social bookmarking sites. Like a favourite family recipe, Delicious is easy to join and has user-friendly steps that direct you to begin using the site to its maximum potential. In the time it takes to boil an egg, I was able to add 5 bookmarks, with scrumptious descriptions and tag words for each site. Bite into my first social bookmarking attempt at http://delicious.com/Canadanz to see my tastiest bookmarks.
There are many handy features that cater to a user’s Delicious experience. To begin with, bookmarks can be added to the site either by copying and pasting the URL or by adding and clicking on the icons that users have the option of attaching to their tool bar. Both methods introduce you to a screen where the URL is displayed along with the title of the site, a note section to remind yourself about any pertinent information pertaining to the site (limited to 1000 characters), an area for tags, the choice of making it public or private, and lastly a place to list users who you may want to send the site to. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perception, the note section can only be seen by the account holder. Users concoct their own list of tags to describe each bookmark and are provided with some guidance by Delicious, as they dish-up a list of popular tag words that other users have attached to the same site. These tags are then added to your personal list of tags where they are ranked in two ways – first with a top ten list of your most used tags and then alphabetically, with the number of times it has been used next to it. Tagging can become a bit of a problem when different users, each with their own perspective, place a spectrum of different tags to the same site – so users should take these tag labels with a grain of salt. To address this situation the term folksonomies was whipped up by Thomas Vander Wal to “describe the type of collaborative categorization that becomes possible when collective categories are created by the general population” (Haworth & Frank, 2008 http://design.test.olt.ubc.ca/Del.icio.us_and_Educational_Social_Bookmarking). Delicious makes it easy to search for sites that have a specific tag attached to them via URLs (just add your tag word to the end of the URL like this: http://delicious.com/tag/yourtagwordhere) or by clicking on the tag in the provided tag cloud.
Users’ bookmarks are organized according to the date they were added or alphabetically and can be displayed in three view formats: title, regular view and full view. All three views display the number of other users that have bookmarked the same site and the edit/delete options. Delicious also allows you to see the most popular bookmarks and the most recent bookmarks that people have added to the site, which aids in the ease of connecting with others. With the click of a mouse, users can add a user to their network and/or add them to their subscriptions, which is why this web 2.0 tool is easy to gorge yourself on.
Delicious – For my own Personal Learning Palate
Delicious is a web 2.0 technology that I plan on feasting on for as long as there is a buffet of websites available. In fact, Delicious is the answer to a little research problem that I’ve been having… let me explain! Have you ever been in a situation where you’re searching for something specific and in the process of looking for the information you follow link after link through a ridiculous number of websites? Then when you locate your tasty piece of information you realize that you’ve just seen a lot of other really appetizing information and now you have no idea how to efficiently find it again? Social bookmaking is the solution to this burning problem! With Delicious all I have to do is click on my bookmarking icon and save the link with delectable tags that will enable me to quickly access it when I need it. Although, I really enjoy the ability of saving my favourite websites in one location (I previously copied the link to a word document – stone age, I know), I’m not so sure the tagging system is the most efficient way to organize information. At present I have approximately 15 bookmarks and 80ish tag words and, even when compared to Will Richardson (http://delicious.com/willrich) who has over 2500 bookmarks and almost 700 tags, this is still a lot of tags. The situation that I’ve run into is two fold: First I didn’t realize that terms with two or more words are typically attached by an underscore, as in language_arts, and secondly when I began adding bookmarks I was conservative in the number of tags that I gave them. Now that I’m more experienced with Delicious, specifically with my networks and subscriptions, I realize that I may need to go back and edit my bookmarks from time-to-time to ensure that I’ve used the most appropriate tags, both for myself and for others to access them. This could be time consuming.
My favourite part of this Delicious meal is that I have a market full of potentially useful websites that people I trust have hand selected and in an almost infinite number of websites – this may direct me to the juiciest websites available. I also enjoy the option of using the RSS feed button for any of the tags that are of particular interest to me. On-the-other-hand, my biggest beef about Delicious is its appearance; it is not going to win an award for its mouth-watering presentation. Although it is uncluttered and free of advertising, the colours are drab and it doesn’t come across as flashy or as exciting as some of the other web 2.0 tools and I don’t feel as if my Delicious account is as personalized as I would like it to be. Considering the information overload that many people are suffering from, internet addiction has even become a recognized mental health issue (http://www.netaddiction.com/whatis.htm), Delicious may in fact be doing its users a favour. I’m fine with this, but still wish that it used its namesake in a more culinary expressive format… at least it would make me want to visit it more often! One other tiny complaint that I have is that the notes are only accessible to the user, when it may be beneficial to understand why my network friends thought a site was worthy of bookmarking. Regardless, I look forward to convincing my friends and family to set up an account, so that we can begin sharing websites of personal interest.
Delicious – for my Professional Learning Taste Buds
As I began to experience the exciting menu of web 2.0 technologies I briefly asked my colleagues if they were social bookmarking regulars. Amongst the many confused looking faces, I was lucky enough to find two teachers who were both Delicious users. When asked how they use their Delicious accounts, it was discovered that they learned about social bookmarking at the 2009 GETCA Teachers’ Convention (http://www.getca.com/) and primarily used them professionally. One of the teachers works with grade 3 and 4 students who have special needs and he found that Delicious helped his students who had difficulty accurately typing long URLs. Instead of deliberating over the exactness of a URL he simply has his students go to his Delicious home page and access the necessary sites from this one page. He also said that it prevented them from aimlessly searching on the internet, locating information that they generally had difficulty reading and prevented them from accessing inappropriate sites, as he could hand select sites that would meet their specific learning needs. Another way of using Delicious with our students would be to have a class account or individual accounts where the students would have the opportunity to share their bookmarks with each other. This could be a smash hit for collaborative projects (Richardson, 2009 http://www.amazon.com/Blogs-Wikis-Podcasts-Powerful-Classrooms/dp/1412959721/ref=ed_oe_p). Of course if you teach older students you may want to use your bookmarks (along with RSS feeds) to draw your students’ attention to class readings or the freshest sites (Hedreen, 2005 http://frequanq.blogspot.com/2005/02/social-bookmarking-in-education.html).
In addition to sharing our bookmarks with our students we can also dish them out to our colleagues. This may bubble-up into some of the following benefits, as suggested on the CR2.0 wiki (http://wiki.classroom20.com/Social+Bookmarking):
- Network with other educators around the globe who share your interests.
- Create social bookmark accounts for your school's academic departments. Teachers within the department all contribute to the growing database of web resources.
- Contact other people for professional networking, based on their social bookmarks.
- Share bookmarks on research topics.
- Subscribe to someone's bookmarks via RSS feed and receive updates whenever they add new websites.
- Collaborate on projects with other schools, sharing bookmarks between all participating communities.
And of course this is not an exhaustive list!
Below you will find a smorgasbord of pros and cons for using Delicious in the classroom:
Pros
Bookmarks can be made public or private
Encourages collaboration/networking
Easy to use
Basic in appearance, not visually distracting
Connect/share with others locally or from around the world
Opportunity for critical thinking about the tagging folksonomy
Tags aid in organization and accessibility
Eliminates need for students to type long URLs
Provides pre-selected, meaningful and safe sites for students
May bring attention to useful websites that may otherwise have gone unnoticed
Storage for useful/meaningful websites, as opposed to always searching for them
Web savvy users may share higher quality websites (http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/howtoarticles/social-bookmarking)
Can be accessed on any computer
Cons
Tags may not be descriptive, consistent or carry the same meaning for every user
Can’t see other users notes for their bookmarks
Basic in appearance, could be too boring
Spammers and marketers using the tags to attract visitors to their websites (http://bookmarkdevil.com/socialbookmarking/)
Reduces student access to inappropriate websites
As an educator, I believe that social bookmarking delivers me another way to connect with my classroom of 21st century learners, through the sites that they may personally be interested in or those that they are using for their learning. Delicious will benefit my English language learners (ELLs) by directing their attention to specific websites selected for their individual needs, as opposed to letting them aimlessly surf the internet that may exceed their reading level. This is one tantalizing morsel of a web 2.0 technology that I plan on savouring for years to come both professionally and personally!
Posts
"Aimlessly surfing..." some people have tried to butter (notice the food reference) up my students cruising for videos as part of them processing (food term). Nope....aimlessly surfing. Using tools like this to provide direction and structure is a great idea. Now I need to go workout!!!
ReplyDeleteHonestly, once I started to use the food terminology I just couldn't pop the toaster. In fact there were more, a buffet of them in fact, but I just had to CUT some before people began to think I was made of Cool Whip or some other not-so-nice equivalent!
ReplyDeleteloving the wonderful food terminology - but it's not helping with my cravings! Your "voice" in this blog is great, very down to earth and approachable. Kudos!
ReplyDeleteThanks! Now I just have to figure out a way to do this for every post! This one took me forever and aside from the upcoming daylight savings time change, the number of hours in a day are not increasing!
ReplyDelete