sooo DEL.ICIO.US

Time to start talking about social networking sites. You may be familiar with MySpace, Facebook, and too many others to name so instead of trying, lets just talk about how they can help you learn. The first one we will address is DELICIOUS. Otherwise known as del.icio.us.

Delicious, (Im leaving out the periods from this point on because Ive been typing all day and don't need any extra key strokes if possible) is a Social Bookmarking site. That means people use the site as a place to bookmark their favorite websites. Its a social site because the users supply the content. The users can make friends and set up their own networks with people they have favorite sites in common with. And users create notes and tags to highlight each site.

So how can this work for helping you with my courses:

1. This is a great place to do research. If you go into Google, and type in "Hurricane Katrina" you will get over 13 million hits. There is no way you are going to navigate through more than a page or two of what comes up because it is way too much. If you go to delicious and type in the same term, you will ONLY get 2800 hits. That's because people have already done the sorting for you. They come across a site on a topic they enjoy and save it to delicious. Then the rest of us come on and check out which sites people like best out of all that research. People mark their favorites by saving the site and the more times a site has been saved the more likely you will find something useful in it, or at least something people enjoy.

2. Unlike many search engines, when you look up a term on delicious you will get a very short keyword description of what the article is about. These types of keywords are known as tags.
Click here for a demonstration

3. If you would like to collaborate with students in our course, you can set up a network of our students and you can all share your favorite sites from your research. Essentially, if you are sharing then you will have less research to do, which is a wonderful thing.

Check out this helpful vid: