Using Social Bookmarking as a Teaching Tool

Okay, so you have a del.icio.us account, and you have added many of your favourite websites to it. Now what?

Have you even noticed that most of what is on the Internet is not that useful? Well, when a person chooses to bookmark a page, it usually indicates that the site has some value in relation to other sites.

Once you have registered and logged into del.icio.us, you can perform a 'tag' search. A tag is like a keyword in an academic search, except that when a user saves a link, they can define the tags themselves.

The tag search bar is at the top right-hand side of the page.

For example, if you search for the term 'English', it will return the favourite links of all users - defined by the number of people who have saved the link (in the search that I just did, 'Common Errors in English' was the top link with 3429 people having saved it).

Some ideas for integrating this into teaching:
1. Generate a course link list - create a user identity for your course, then save relevant links so that all students can access it.

2. Class generation of link list - create a common user identity for your course, and have students find important/high quality information, and each contribute to the communal course link list.

3. Have students perform tag searches, and compare the quality of results with what is generated by a standard search engine.

Have a great idea? Share it through the 'comment' feature below this post.

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