Posts tagged delicious

Short version:

Make your useful bookmarks public for others to benefit from, and consider exploring the bookmarks of others who have done the same. Create an account in delicious, diigo or both.

Image: Some rights reserved by Derbeth

Long version:

There is a a really simple way to breathe out as much as you breathe in when it comes to bookmarking useful websites. Make those bookmarks public so that others can see them. It’s called social bookmarking, and this can in itself be a form of PLN. There are online tools available which require you to identify yourself through an account which you set up, and then you can ‘publish’ the bookmarks so that others can follow your continual stream of collected bookmarks as you add to them. You can also tag each bookmark with one or more categories, to help yourself and others locate links specific to a particular topic. You can follow others and visit their public bookmarks and their tags. You can join groups where like-minded educators pool useful bookmarks under a theme.

As you begin to share your bookmarks online, you have the added advantage of being able to access them from any connected Internet browser anywhere in the world.

This is easier than it might at first sound. Most people who use bookmarks stored locally on their computer via their internet browser go through a short series of steps (such as right click, bookmark, choose a folder or tag for the bookmark) which could easily be replaced with another set of steps that are just as straightforward to complete, but allow you to share what you deem good and begin to connect with others who are doing the same.

There are several social bookmarking tools, but the two I will discuss here are delicious and diigo. I use both. Delicious is perhaps the better know one, with a wider ‘readership’. Diigo, however, is in some ways more powerful and has other features which could potentially be useful to educators such as the ability to leave written comments / questions on websites (in the guise of virtual post it notes) that will be visible to other diigo users. This has huge potential for a network of likeminded educators, although I haven’t yet tapped into this at the time of writing.

One really great thing is that bookmarks you submit to diigo can automatically feed into an account you have with delicious. So you simply set up your account with each of delicious and diigo, establish the connection between the two*, and then work with diigo. If this sounds like a step too far, you could choose one of them, but I still recommend diigo for its extra functionality. I particularly like the diigo toolbar which you can download for Internet Explorer or Firefox browser which makes bookmarking a snap.

With the toolbar installed, when you come across a site you find useful, click on the bookmark button and a pop up invites you to add tags. It remembers tags as you add them for later usage, so that when you begin to type it in, you can quickly locate it and select it.

My personal approach now is to add any site (including those I link to here on this website) which I think could be useful to educators. I still store bookmarks privately on my browser but only those that I don’t need to share such as bank websites and hotel bookings.

The best way forwards here is to spend some time experimenting with it by setting it up. To get you started, and for a brief video introduction to diigo, view this:

Try to make your use of diigo (or delicious or an alternative) part of your routine. That’s why I like the diigo toolbar – very easy to use. My bottom line way of thinking here is, why hoard bookmarks when I can just as easily share them? Later we can look at ways of publishing some of your social bookmarks (or their categories) elsewhere on the Internet such as on your blog.

Next in the #15MINPLN series: No. 8 – Join the Twitter Network

*When signed in to diigo, access ‘Tool’s and then on the left hand menu visit ‘More tools …’ and then click on ‘Save to delicious’ and then follow the step under Option 2 – Associate with a delicious account. It simply means your bookmarks may now double in value as some users only consult delicious, and otherwise might not find them via diigo.