Back in Week 2, I set up a Delicious social bookmarking account. I was inspired to do so by one of that lesson's articles entitled "Weaving Web 2.0 into classroom practice". For the last five weeks or so, I have been using Delicious to bookmark the many articles, websites, videos and other bits and pieces of information that have been building from a variety of sources. Initially, I could see the value of having an immediate, easy way to bookmark something of interest. I also appreciated that you could add additional bibliographical information. What I didn't fully understand at that point, was the notion of tagging. In Week 2, I only had a few documents bookmarked. I now have 65 bookmarks. As my list gets longer, my appreciation grows for the value of the tag. Tagging, used effectively, is an excellent organizational tool. The longer my list of resources gets, the more detailed I find my tags need to be. Initially, I was using such general terms as "Web 2.0" and "technology". Although these tags are appropriate, I discovered that I needed to be more specific if I wanted to have quick access to topic-specific information. If, for example, I didn't remember the name of a particular article, I only had to know that it was on the topic of wikis in order to retrieve it, assuming I imputed "wiki" as a specific tag. Of all the new technologies investigated so far in this course, I have found social bookmarking to be one of the most helpful in the process of "making sense" of and organizing information. At this point, I am using tagging more as an internal organizational structure and have not delved into the social aspect yet. Where I have been investigating this realm a little more has been with my forays into LibraryThing. Here is a place I could see myself spending some time! I have been in a book club for years and love to talk about books! I'll talk to complete strangers about their suggested reads, whether I'm in a book store, a library, on the beach or in a cafeteria line-up! For this reason, LibraryThing makes me feel like a "kid in a candy store"...so many like-minded people all wanting to discuss books! I have particularly enjoyed finding those who have my favourite reads on their book lists and finding out what other titles and authors they enjoy. I've also joined a few discussion groups and would love to spend some time "hanging out" there at some point. Here, once again, I come to the crux of an issue that is of constant wonderment to me. Where do people find the time? It amazes me how many hours people must invest documenting and discussing. Maybe one day I'll have the leisure time to do the same. In the meantime, I'll just enjoy being an occasional tourist in this wonderful world of books!
If you'd like to see how my Delicious list is expanding, feel free to access it through this blog. Above is a print screen of my LibraryThing page.
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