Blog #3: Social Bookmarking sites....

Blog #3: Social Bookmarking Sites (Delicious).

Firstly, I watched ‘social bookmarking in plain English’ on youtube. This video clip was very useful in justifying the use of an application such as delicious. The link to the video is … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeBmvDpVbWc

From what I gathered from the video, ‘bookmarking’ refers to the saving of good or useful websites on your internet browser. Though this process can clutter up your ‘favourites’ section if you are bookmarking a lot of sites. And these bookmarks are specific to a particular computer, meaning you can only view your ‘favourites’ or bookmarks on that one computer. Along comes social bookmarking sites such as ‘delicious’ and grants users a free webpage to store these bookmarks. This makes a neater job of storing a bunch of useful sites and it also allows the users to access these bookmarks from any computer with internet access.

I then visited the delicious website and set up an account. The website prompted the user to either make a completely new account, or log in from a yahoo user account, or even login from an existing facebook account. It’s amazing how all of these internet applications are interconnected and one user account can establish accounts on all of these sites. I set up an account using my facebook account. The link to my delicious page is the following http://www.delicious.com/2be9026849256c3e8964b1dc6d7ad2ed
On a side note, I had previously posted the link to my bookmark page on my blog site. To include that same link on this blog post I used the copy and paste function. When I pasted the web address into this report, nothing appeared. It took me a while to realise that within my blog the font is coloured white so when something is copied from it and pasted into a document with a white background, nothing appears. One must select the pasted information ‘blindly’ and change its colour.

The one aspect that makes these sites social is that each users bookmark page is public. Everyone can therefore see which sites you find useful and you can see which other sites that people find useful. This feature doesn’t really make sense unless you know the person and know their interests. From an educational perspective, if you could view the bookmarks of a fellow teacher who also taught the same subjects as you, then you could potentially benefit from sharing bookmarks. In a wider scope, an entire school could sign up for a school-based delicious account to keep track of more general websites that teachers could benefit from.

Our school (Earl Marriott) is currently in debate with the school district over changing the bell schedule to a 5-block day in order to accommodate our 1900+ students. So much technical and legal information is associated within this proposal and our staff union representative is trying hard to keep up with keeping the staff up to date with our/their rights. Instead of attaching documents to emails he could potentially create a school-wide delicious site and bookmark all the pages that he is referencing and presenting to the staff. That way, the staff could access the information more readily and not be limited to the information our staff representative presents us with. If instead, our staff representative presented us with a bookmark site that shows various articles and more information for those who desire more descriptive details, then users could decide the quantity of information they read.

For more ideas on ways to use the delicious bookmark site, I visited the website http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-use-delicious-social-bookmarking/ in which Kristi Hines offered up 8 ways to use delicious. Kristi brought up some good ideas and I especially enjoyed the idea regarding the creation of a company delicious site for employees to see all the bookmarked sites that could yield good information. I immediately thought of a building contractor and the website links to all the reliable trades companies that worked out great and not-so-great. A contractor could use a bookmark page for future reference of who to hire and this list could be shared with other contractors or companies requiring services.

Educationally this idea of a school-wide bookmark site could be used for purposes such as giving parents links to available tutors or learning centres that work best for students. Also, as educational cutbacks become a yearly reality, teachers could use a social bookmark site to keep track of sites that offer competitive prices on constantly required school supplies such as overhead transparencies, projector bulbs, and photocopy paper etc.