Module 7

Mmm...Delicious

Delicious (www.delicious.com/) is a powerful and dynamic social bookmarking tool, which provides many opportunities for users, both personally and professionally. Delicious allows you to:

• access your online bookmarks from any browser, anywhere

• discover great handpicked websites (that others have discovered) with less spam than other search sites

• share the bookmarks you love with others, or hide bookmarks that are private

I think one of the biggest advantages of Delicious, for me at least, is that it allows you to store all useful websites that you have heard about, found or used, in one central location which you can access anywhere, anytime. I have been a regular user and lover of ‘favourites’ and ‘bookmarks’ on my personal and work computers. While this has been great, when you move from computer to computer, get a new computer, (or gremlins get into your computer!), this wonderful collection of useful websites that you have been building, organising and using for so long is lost! I have been very disappointed when this has happened to me, on more than one occasion! If only I knew about delicious...

Well, actually, I had heard of delicious, but didn't really know much about it. A work acquaintance recommended this online tool to me years ago. I thought it sounded great, but unfortunately, I never got around to looking into it, and then completely forgot about it. Until of course, I was reminded about it in this Web 2.0 Course!

I enjoyed watching "Social Bookmarking in Plain English" - Parts One & Two, and felt they provided an excellent introduction to Delicious. After viewing these videos, I successfully, and relatively easily, set up a Delicious account, added quite a few bookmarks to my account, organised them according to a range of "tags" (or keywords), added a few people to my "network" (a collection of people whose bookmarks I would like to view and follow) and browsed their bookmarks. What an absolutely fantastic way to find great, practical websites and resources to use in the classroom- without having to spend hours looking for them yourself! Delicious has also been an excellent way for me to store some of my frequently used websites, as well as all the tools covered to date in Web 2.0. I will therefore have no excuse for forgetting about any of these tools and not using them!

Following other people’s delicious bookmarking (through the online network that you build), and allowing others to follow your bookmarking (by making your bookmarks public), are what makes this bookmarking tool “social". I found that it can be a little tricky to find people and add them to your network. You can search for the person, however people may use different screen names to their actual names. Therefore, if you want to add a particular person to your network, it is probably best to ask them what their delicious bookmarking name is. As well as searching for network users, you can also carry out general searches for bookmarks on a particular issue/topic.

How could this tool be used in the Classroom?

You could create Delicious accounts for students to use at school, so that you can also sign in and contribute to the accounts, e.g. add bookmarks that you would like students to refer to when working in the classroom, or instruct students to add bookmarks to their account. If the teacher sets the user name and password for these student accounts, it should make it much easier for the teacher to monitor the students' use of these accounts, e.g. make sure students are using the account for school purposes and using it appropriately. The fact that students know you can access their account, is also likely to make them more responsible and accountable when using this online tool. The issue of monitoring students' use of Web2.0 tools covered to date has been an area of concern for me. Perhaps this is one way around this issue.