http://delicious.com
The sprawl of information online can be daunting. While Google provides excellent search capabilities (capabilities that improve everyday), there is still a strong desire and need to organise information. Delicious brings to the fore a new kind of organising principle – the folksonomy – a taxonomy created by the ‘folks’, the crowd. Perhaps the metadata which helps us to know what knowledge is can come not from a central source, via prior arrangement, but from multiple individual acts of assessment which, together, add up to something coherent.
The basics
Delicious is a long-established service which allows users to collect, annotate, tag, organise and then share or publish links to websites and other online resources. Delicious has come into its own, in recent years, as a service that can interlink with blogs via an automated import of recent delicious bookmarks, but has also suffered from a lack of overall development once bought by Yahoo. Delicious has strong and effective tools for managing collections of bookmarks and some capacity to network and share these privately. Most of all, delicious is a simple way of getting students into the practices of attaching metadata to their links and of thinking about the way to categorise what they are reading.
The aggregation of group work on resource management is probably best done outside of delicious, via feeds from a series of individual accounts. Delicious feeds, which can be based on particular tags, and either public or private, make delicious a deep reservoir of knowledge potential.
Pedagogic Challenge
Probably the key challenge in all ‘resource collecting’ tasks that can be set using delicious is the tendency for the work to turn into ‘finding the right number of references and then stopping’. In other words, delicious works best as an everyday part of ongoing scholarly work – creating an artificial task to ‘build online resources’, whether individually or in groups, can be demotivating of the kind of active engagement with the skills to be learned. Therefore using delicious must be linked in a realistic manner to the ‘output’ of that research work – either in an essay or similar form or, perhaps better, by emphasising that ‘curation’ of online information (filtering, tagging, organising to add value) is itself a key part of knowledge work these days.
Delicious could, however, be used in the ‘scaffolded’ partial information model: a lecturer, in preparing their course materials, places a series of references into delicious and then exports the list (perhaps with a question attached to each, in place of an annotation) and then gets students to upload this list into their own special-purpose delicious accounts – students then do the work of annotating, answering and arranging the information.
Either way, using delicious needs to bring to mindfulness in each student the conscious realisation of what it means to think ‘meta’ about ‘data’.
Alternatives
Diigo is the most likely alternative to delicious: note that Yahoo has suggested it might not continue to support and host Delicious in future.
Read…
James, from .eduGuru blog, provides a simple explanation of Delicious
Belford, R. et al. 2010. An Introduction to Enhancing Learning with Online Resources, Social Networking, and Digital Libraries. Enhancing Learning with Online Resources, Social Networking, and Digital Libraries, pp 1-19, ACS Symposium Series, Volume 1060
Farwell, T. and Waters, R. 2010. Exploring the Use of Social Bookmarking Technology in Education: An Analysis of Students’ Experiences using a Course-specific Delicious.com Account. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 6.2.
Grosseck, G. Using Delicious in Education.
