WEEK3: Making weblinks DELICIOUS

DELICIOUS logo.

      Week3 started badly for me. I had a computer crash in the beginning of the week,  which compelled me to reformat my hard disk drive. I lost many important files in the process and consequently, I have not been able to hand in my midweek assignment on time. Things are slowly falling back into place now, but I have just realized that the loss and its impacts would have been much lower If I had discovered a social bookmarking site like DELICIOUS sooner. So far I was satisfied with saving bookmarks within my web browser. Although I have an account on bitly.com, I would just use it for shortening long weblinks for my personal blog and Twitter.

      What struck me with Delicious is its ease of use. It only took me 5 minutes to create my own page and start saving my first links. I have even been able to import some links from my browser in just three steps. I am now sure that I will never lose a link again: not only do I have an online backup of my bookmarks in case my laptop dies, but also I can access my links from any computer via the web. What I am planning to do now is extend the use of delicious across my school. Therefore, I’ll create a colleague and a student network in my Delicious page in order to add more people.

      With students I want to use Delicious for extending their learning at home. I’ll tag links to assignments or lessons with the name of the different classes (for example AD2 for my second class of executive assistants). Then I will give them the web address to my delicious page (delicious.com/niangthierry) so that they can look through my bookmarks to find the links corresponding to their class. I have also discovered that Delicious offers a possibility to register to specific tags. This feature is great for finding good websites and resources about the topics we study in class. It will spare the students browsing thousands of results suggested by search engines. 

      With my colleagues, I will start sharing links tagged with meaningful names (grammar, vocabulary, writing, for instance). When they feel comfortable using the new tool and start sharing their own links in the same way, I’ll register a Delicious account for the English Teaching Unit of the school. I’ll import into it our shared links. This will allow us to network easily with foreign schools or colleagues owning a delicious page. This form of “cooperation” will eventually allow us to find and retrieve useful websites for improving our teaching. With Delicious we will also be able to view bookmarks from users in our network and communicate in real time with them as well. Right now, I am following Deborah Healey, the author of the excellent tutorials shared by Sean, the instructor of this course. I can see her public links and believe me, she does share excellent links. I am also delighted to announce that I now have my first follower on Delicious. He is a member of our class. I also followed him as soon as I saw him in my network so we can talk about this course and share experience. Delicious actually deserves its name!