Del.icio.us

The del.icio.us social bookmarking experience is something different! I am currently using del.icio.us to bookmark some sites for use in a project on Internet2 that I am working on with a group of students in my class at St. Joe’s. I tend to get lost in clouds, so I am using just the tagging feature for my bookmarks. I must admit my tags are a mess. I have not gotten the hang of it yet. I have multiple tags that stand for the same thing. How do I choose a tagging format? I want to use the tag information literacy but I can’t because del.icio.us won’t let me put a space in my tags. So I have multiple tags for information literacy: information, information-literacy, and Information_Literacy, all because I can’t remember what tag I used last time. Tagging should be simple but for me it’s not. I think most librarians have this problem because we are used to having things tagged for us. I am determined to start a new del.icio.us site and have all the tags conform to Library of Congress Subject Headings. I also bookmarked the link on my Congerjan del.icio.us.
Anyway, I have been using del.icio.us for about a year but I must admit that all I was doing was saving bookmarks. I never even shared my links or took advantage of the social aspect until recently. I turned on the sharing feature during class as others were joining del.icio.us. I joined Will Richardson’s network almost immediately. I also added the links from my favorite podcaster, Brian Dvorak who does the EDTech101 podcast. I also have two more people on my del.icio.us network now. It is interesting to see what other technology integrators are saving to their del.icio.us accounts. I hope that some of my fellow librarians and my friends in my St. Joe class will try this social aspect and we can add each other to our networks.

Social Bookmarking

Wow... it took me a long time to get back to the subject of tags and social bookmarking. How could I forget about the Creative Commons Social Bookmarking video? This is how I first realized I could make more than one Del.icio.us page for different subjects... and grade levels. I did not have to subject my students to the overfilled haze that one of my bookmarking attempts has become. Or, I could use tags for different subjects like Dewey, Library Skills, etc.

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Now... for the international perspective on social bookmarking…

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I want to use these types of social bookmarking sites with my students but I am still having a problem with tags and clouds. Clouds drive me nuts, I do not see the world in clouds, I see chaos in clouds. However, I understand that all of my students do not learn like I do so, if using clouds will help them, I am willing to try. Tags are also not fun simply because as a librarian I am used to thinking in a controlled vocabulary, it is orderly and I can find things. My tags are numbers; they are called the Dewey Decimal System! Now I am not saying that I use Dewey to tag on social bookmarking sites but I am saying as I have said before that there should be a controlled language for tags because we call things by many different names. What I tag as technology may not be what someone else tags as technology. However, on social bookmarking sites, all of our sites come together under that one tag. The Internet needs librarians or at the least, our students needs librarians who can lead them through the tag cloud.