Del.icio.us and tagging - reminds of the ikeepbookmarks website; one that was introduced to me by a fellow librarian several years ago. The idea is the same - take your bookmarks/favorites with you wherever you go. This involved a lot of copying and pasting of URLs, but you could organize your bookmarks in folders and share with others. Del.icio.us is very similar but with the addition of tags. Tags let you label your bookmarks with "subject headings" (that's library talk!). The neat thing about this is it allows you to narrow down the reason why you have bookmarked this site. If you are like me you bookmark sites and end up with tons of bookmarks and then can't always remember why you thought that site was worth bookmarking. With tags I can go back and see what was important to me at the time via the tags.
What I don't like about Del.icio.us:
1. I have a hard time not typing a comma in between tags!
2. I can't find the option of organizing my bookmarks into folders - just by tags.
3. It is easy to add a website to your favorites if you are on a computer where the buttons have been downloaded. However, if you are at a different computer, that doesn't have the buttons - I found it harder to do. If you are on a public computer, you can't download the buttons and you have to look for the site through the Del.icio.us website.
How could Del.icio.us be used in education?
This tool could be used in many ways - teachers could set up an account and add favorites and tags around a certain subject; students could use this individually or in group settings to share websites for projects; teachers could set up an account to narrow websites for students to use; and of course librarians could use this to share library related websites.
I did set up a Del.icio.us account and added a few websites, however I don't have this tool as a top priority right now - I am still trying to keep up with my Google Reader!
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