del.icio.us 101

Community

Cooperative Learning

Author: derekeb

Social Bookmarking: A del.icio.us way to share your knowledge, interests and passion

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, which means it is designed to allow you to store, tag, manage and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser. Since del.icio.us is web-based, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter whether you're using a computer at home, school, or in a library.

With emphasis on the power of community knowledge, del.icio.us makes it easy for you to discover, remember and share resources on the Internet and with your students or colleagues.

You can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. Or you can save bookmarks on del.icio.us as private -- only viewable by you if you like. You have control over who gets to see what you're saving.

Tag, you're it!

What the heck is a tag? Simply stated, tagsare one-word descriptions that you can assign to your bookmarks on del.icio.us. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like and easily rename or delete them later. Tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.

Find the Invisible Threads

You can place links in a classroom delicious account as a jumping off point for students. As students begin to research a topic, they can add links and search the community bookmark pool.

In this approach, students are scaffolding their own knowledge and the teacher is working as a facilitator, instead of a sage on the stage. This also makes del.icio.us an organic learning tool, evolving with the interests and needs of the learning community.

You can also find other people on del.icio.us who have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection. You can see whether two people have chosen to remember a link, or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember -- which may help you find things that are useful for you too.

Deliciously simple professional development

Why not try using del.icio.us as part of a school or district teacher development program? del.icio.us is an easy and quick way to create a cache of articles, interesting resources, or other things you find on the web. And since the bookmarks have been tagged by your peers, it makes it easy (and fast) to find the exact information you need.

A social bookmarking tool like del.icio.us is perfectly suited to work as a facilitator, providing users with the tools to chunk, scaffold, and organize knowledge in a format that best suits them. In a nutshell, del.icio.us opens the path to shared knowledge instead of being a digital pothole on the e-learning super information highway.

Get Organized! Save Time!

As you store, save, tag and share more content, it becomes more and more difficult to remember what tag you used for similar content. But don't fret! del.icio.us has come up with a slick way to help you to maintain tagging consistency.

Here's how it works: as you bookmark links to your cache, del.icio.us auto-magically suggests tags you have previously used and shows you what tags others in your network have used on that link.

Ready for another neat trick? When you click on a tag, del.icio.us shows related tags, thereby allowing you to easily find related topics and resources.

In short, del.icio.us makes it easier to find content at a later date, prevents user frustration with the technology, and allows students to focus on learning.

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