Week 7: Social Bookmarking With Delicious

From flickr user: topgold

“My new computer came with Windows 7. 
Windows 7 is much more user-friendly than Windows Vista. 
I don’t like that.” -Sheldon Cooper 

Delicious is a social bookmarking site that can be used to organize your favorite sites.  But, the catch is it all hinges on your ability to organize, mainly through appropriate tagging.  For example, if I assigned a project on starfish, my students could Google “starfish” and come up with about 14 million pages to visit.  And suppose they found some really good sites in all of that abundance which they want to remember to use later.  They can simply tag it using Delicious, which transfers the site to their Delicious page that can be accessed by any computer, whether they are at home or in the library or on their own laptop.  But here’s the catch.  If my students tag each site simply with “starfish” then when they go to find that site again they are still going to have to look back through the 100 sites they’ve tagged.  Instead, when tagging a site they must use key words like anatomy, reproduction, propagation, diet, predation, etc to be able to narrow down their search and make Delicious an effective way to manage information.   

Basically if you’re not organized, Delicious won’t be any better for you than simply bookmarking a page with your internet browser.  The only positive is you will be able to access this monstrous list of pages on any computer.   To be effective, Delicious users must be organized from the get-go.  If they can do this, then I believe it will be a very effective learning tool, in particular an excellent research resource!

Here's how my first Delicious search went: 

When I originally searched “Scientific Teaching Methods” I got 152 bookmarks.  By selecting the tag “Education” I got 116 bookmarks.  By selecting the tags “Science” and “Education” I got 109.  It would have been more effective if I could have filtered out the high school curriculum with a “university”, “college”, or “secondary education” tag.   However, if I just utilize the tag “Science” I got 22 bookmarks.  This was much more manageable and it seemed to eliminate much of the high school resource sites, but it also got rid a site that had all sorts of video lectures from schools like MIT which would have been very useful.  I can see this being a limitation of Delicious, in that not only does it rely on my organization, but also the organization of others!

Here are some interesting links I found using Delicious:

• The ultimate resource for information on Graduate Research from Iowa State University: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~honavar/grad-advice.html
• Introduction to Journal-Style Scientific Writing: http://abacus.bates.edu/~ganderso/biology/resources/writing/HTWgeneral.html
• Activities to identify the controls and variables within an experiment using the Simpsons! http://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/controls.html
• Teaching the process of science: http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/process_of_science/index.html\
• How to use “R” in statistics: http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/KB/R/index.html
• Teaching about evolution in science: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=5787
• The first scientific video journal: http://www.jove.com/

http://www.jove.com

Or you can look me up on Delicious, I'm user e_n_6913!

Overall opinion: Used in the right way (i.e. organization to the extreme), this could be a really useful tool.  I would suggest it to my students to use.  The one thing I did like about Diigo that I didn't see with Delicious was the ability to create a class account so that all of the students in that class could tag good sites on that particular topic in one central location.  If there is a way to use Delicious to do this, I believe it would be an awesome tool for groups to use when collaborating on a research project. 

I believe that Sheldon Cooper may be an expert in the field of organization, much to the utter exasperation of the rest of us mere mortals!  I think Delicious (or any social bookmarking) would be something Sheldon would excel at.  It combines his love of organization (he organizes his cereal according to fiber content, see “The Big Bran Hypothesis”) and his requirement of limiting user friendliness.  Plus he could “virtually” socialize with other organized people, or just refuse to share his bookmarks! 

Leonard: We need to widen our circle.
Sheldon: I have a very wide circle. I have 212 friends on MySpace.
Leonard: Yes, and you've never met one of them.
Sheldon: That's the beauty of it.