Social+Bookmarking

[|Delicious] ([|www.delicious.com])

Delicious is a Web 2.0 social bookmarking tool owned by Yahoo!, which is primarily used by individuals to save and share internet bookmarks that can be shared with others and personalized with content tagging (to allow links to be categorized and described, as well as grouped for easier use and searching) and to search for links that have already been tagged or described by others to provide some aspects of a general search engine such as Google while allowing for individual users to describe their opinion of the site or its useful features. Upon first glance, the educational possibilities for this tool may seem limited, but there are some excellent uses for Delicious as a tool for group efforts to collect and share information on specific topics.

This tool is free and has no user limitations or other restrictions, but it is relatively easy to learn to navigate. Users create an account and can then begin saving bookmarks either by directly inputting them into the site or by installing a web browser tool that adds a button to the browser's toolbar to save bookmarks without going directly to the site itself. At its most basic, one can simply save a URL for later browsing; with a small amount of additional effort, one can add content tags to describe the link (for example, "language", "Japanese", "reading", "flashcards") as well as a short text description ("This site contains many user-created flashcard sets for practicing Japanese characters.") for ease of navigation in the future or by other users. As this site does not have content restrictions, it is possible that by searching for certain terms on the site's search engine, one could find undesired content; however, as the site does not actually load the target webpages any "Net Nanny" applications should block access to unwanted materials.

This tool can be used in activities related to the Communities standard (particularly 5.2) in order to build a collaborative database of student-recommended media links to enhance or add enjoyment to study of the language. At the K-12 level, this can be used to collect, for example, student's favorite links to YouTube video files related to language or culture study. At the university level, this can be used to collect student suggested resources for language study, including useful websites, videos, tools, and other content. An example of this developed by a university-level student at Pitt can be seen at www.delicious.com/nctalibrary, wherein an undergraduate studying East Asian languages and cultures surveyed a library of audiovisual materials available to students and teachers and created a customized database to make it easier to search for specific content that users wanted to view (such as "subtitled" "dvd" "Japan" "religion"), using links to well-known catalogs such as WebCat or IMDB as the basis for the information.

At the K-12 level, many instructors of Japanese report that their students love to share popular videos of Japanese television, music, and cultural content, but that there is often not an appropriate venue to showcase this information as it does not always mesh with classroom objectives. Using Delicious, teachers can create a single account (which should be monitored for content) that students can use on a classroom computer or can send content to their teacher to add that they find useful or interesting for their classmates to share. The content can be grouped by theme and students can be responsible for tagging content and writing descriptions of what the link contains and why it is interesting or useful.

This can be used not only for language study, but also to save important content or sources used in other projects so that they can be accessed instantly. Delicious can also be used as a compliment to other collaborative web projects, providing a single location where all projects can be discovered without compromising student privacy or locking content behind a district firewall, allowing other students and interested web users to access student work. For example, if a class made a number of projects using blogs, a Delicious account could be used to keep track of all of the individual student blog URLs.