Delicious Reflection

Delicious is a social bookmarking website that helps to organize, store and share bookmarked websites. The way the website work is as follows. Users can bookmark websites that they have found useful to them. They then can “tag” the website through the use of a descriptive name that organizes the website into groups. After a user tags a website it is put into a category with other websites with a similar tag. This is helpful to other users because they can then see other websites of similar interest to them.

When I go back and look at the current websites tagged by my classmates under the tags “uwwlibmedia” and “web2.0” I notice some new websites that look interesting to me. If I went through and looked at every website tagged by my classmates I would be on the internet for days straight. However, I see the fact that I can search tagged materials as a perk to this website. Even if I do not save every website suggested by my classmates I can search the tag at a later time when I am looking for something more specific and use my classmate’s suggestions to guide my search.

When I first started hearing about “tags” I was not really sure how I felt about them. I didn’t fully understand their uses, even in my blog now I am not always sure what to tag my blogs as. However, I didn’t start to understand tagging until I became familiar with delicious. My use of tagging is still growing, but I do understand that a tag is a way to sort materials (websites) into categories, kind of like I would a file cabinet, only with more information that fills much less space. I did for a while have a problem with tagging my websites as I did not realize how sensitive tagging can be. If I capitalized a letter in one tag and not in the other it would make a separate folder for that website. Tags do not leave room for human error they always assume I am right because the internet cannot read my mind. As I have become more familiar with tagging I have started to use multiple tags for the same website, although that is still am immerging skill for me. I did find that how others tagged a website impacted my tag of that website, if I agreed with the tag I would use it, if I didn’t think that was the right tag I would not include it when I saved a site. If I was going to teach my students how to understand and use tags, I would start off by talking about organization. Many of my students need better organizational skills so starting with a visual of how to organize lockers and backpacks would be best. After explaining how folders separate our materials in our lockers I would move on to illustrate how tags are the equivalent of a folder for our online lockers.

Tag bundles are a way for a user to in a sense tag their tags. I have not used a tag bundle yet, as I am still new to tagging and delicious. However, I could see as time when on and I really utilized delicious to its full potential that this would be a helpful tool. At the same time this almost seems like overkill. Tagging tags almost seems as though a person needs to work on their organizational skills, however, without the proper background I am not sure if this statement would hold true for me over time.

A tag cloud is a visual picture of a user’s tags. This “cloud” is all the user’s tags arranged in a cloud shape that has the more popular tags bolded while the less used ones are usually smaller and not bold. My tag cloud is currently small. It includes the required tags for this class and also tags that include websites I found helpful for math classes as well as some that I tagged for personal reasons or that would be useful to me as a coach.

An annotation is the ability to add a detail or a description to a tagged website. I did not add many annotations to websites that I tagged. The main reason for this was because most of the titles of the websites were descriptive enough. However, when searching websites I have found that when others added this the websites they were more useful to me and I appreciated that information being there.
Delicious is a great way to connect with others that have similar interests to me. Each time I tag a website it shows me how many others have tagged that same site. If I click on this I can see all of them and read what tags they are using. If I see a person tags many websites that I am interested in I can follow them and see what else they come up with. I found a user by the name of lucasjw that had many tags of interest to me so I have started following him as a result. I have coworkers that have started using similar websites such as Diigo. We discussed the uses and decided to add one another. This is nice as we work in a large school and sometimes sharing information and useful tools is hard to do, so this has made our building a little smaller.

I have seen Diigo used in the reading classes at my school. The students can read materials and do the work directly on the computer. This saves time, paper, and improves student motivation. I feel luck in that I have an administration that supports the use of many of these tools. We have the resources; computers, internet access, and trained staff to do so, so using these assets to their full advantage is a district wide goal.