Module 7

What a delicious idea!

I had heard of Delicious before but had never know what is was for. Upon reading the How to: Del.icio.us tutorial, I was turned off by the fact that you needed to download a toolbar to use application. I have a loathing of custom toolbar downloading and try to avoid it when I can. After watching the Social Bookmarking In Plain English video, it seems that a benefit of Delicious is that you can bookmark sites from any computer. True, this is a great benefit. But what if you don't have the toolbar downloaded on the PC that you are using. Makes things much harder doesn't it?


I made my way to the Delicious site to sign up. I was please to know that there were alternates to downloading the toolbar, especially since I was completing this blog on a friend's computer. You can just copy and past the URL, which is a bit more work but saves clogging up hard drives with toolbars.


The next task was to add a user to your network. A downfall of Delicious is that you cannot import current contacts from you address book to see if any of your friends are using the Delicious network. This is something other social networks do. So I used a social network to send a shout-out to my friends on Facebook so that I didn't need to add a "random" friend.


Activity 4 required finding another teacher's blog. Right! Time to find fellow educators to see how they are doing. I commented on the blogs of two other teachers in my school.

Online communities are an excellent way of sharing information. Why should information be kept under lock and key, only to be used by the person who created it? What is the point of publishing when you don't have an audience in mind? The Internet has "shrunk" the world, making it easier to communicate and send messages to each other. Communities are no longer static in a particular geographic region. They are global and dynamic. Online communities make it easier to share information and to communicate ideas in a real-time setting and in a public forum.

I can see the benefit of using sites like Delicious in the classroom. We provide students with MyClasses pages of websites and information that we, as teachers, find both safe and useful. But what if one of our students goes home and finds another website to add to the list? They will write it down to give to us or email it to us. Then, we will need to find the time to add it to the property on the MyClasses page. Why not give students the options of assessing and evaluating the usefulness of websites themselves. Why not allow students access to Google so that they can shift through the millions of hits that come up? Students need to be equipped with the skills to evaluate these sites themselves. Yes, a site may appear with unsafe content. Yes, the site may be useless. But if teachers are spoon feeding sites to students, how will they learn to say "this is an inappropriate website" or "this is an excellent website"? Creating a class Delicious page and giving students the password means that they can assist in building a list of appropriate websites. Everyone raves about giving students ownership for their learning. So, let's start!

Happy bookmarking!

A