Creation Activity ~ Social Bookmarking

I created a del.icio.us account this spring while taking graduate classes. Although the account was easy enough to set up, I felt that I initially included too many all-purpose tags. Tags such as “technology”, “education”, and “internet” are simply not as useful to the reader as specific tags such as “IPod” or “Wi-Fi”. For readability, I also began to capitalize the first letter of each word in a tag consisting of several words ex: “CyberSafety”.

This summer, during our frequent family travels, I was conducting research and often found myself utilizing whatever computers were available. The Delicious website proved to be a particularly useful Web 2.0 tool which permitted the necessary “portability” of my growing collection of bookmarks. In addition, I frequently found myself following users’ tags and reading in areas of interest. By nature of this folksonomy, I easily connected with individuals who had similar interests. Viewing “Fresh Bookmarks” also served as a type of personal professional development as the latest technology trends appear on this hotlist.

In addition to my own learning, I intend to incorporate Delicious.com into my own classroom use. During the course of a year, I’ll mention numerous websites that students will wish to visit; how convenient to have them available and in one spot. In any class there are always a few students who complete their work quickly and are looking for something else to do; Delicious can solve that problem as well. Since I have recently changed classrooms, I am building a delicious site for my students as well.

The following is the link for my professional delicious site:

http://delicious.com/tags/mrwilliams232

and one for my students:
http://delicious.com/tags/mrwilliams213