Let’s take a small class with 16 students, and divide it into 4 groups of 4 students each. There are 4 topics to cover and each student in the group will research and write about one of these topics in their blog…

Then each group will have a wiki site where they bring together these topics and write about connections and interrelationships between them.

Each student will have their own del.icio.us user account and will accumulate bookmarks to useful web resources appropriate to their topic. Among the tags used for these bookmarks will be an agreed topic tag which is shared by all the students from each group researching the same topic. Thus the ‘freedom of information’ topic might have an agreed tag called ‘FreeInfo’. In this way students will share their bookmarks with others from different groups researching the same topic and by this means will establish a community of practice across groups.

This process will be easy to assess in del.icio.us since the teacher can easily select the tag used by each topic and see how many bookmarks were added by which student.

Just hours after I posted my first entry on this weblog [my original weblog at http://ltoulon.edublogs.org/], I received an email from someone asking me to check out their social bookmarking service BlinkList.  I was amazed that he was able to find my post so fast.  I then remembered there is an RSS button on my blog which edublogs automatically added.  So I understand that my blog automatically has a web feed (RSS feed) on it and anyone with a web feed reader (aggregator) can receive updates to my blog automatically through their reader.  I have never used a reader before and started doing some research on it.

I did a search for RSS Reader on Google and came up with 105,000,000 hits!  So where to start?  I started with Bloglines and added a couple of Blogs that I read regularly.  I would be interested to hear other recommendations.

For years, I have been using an online bookmark manager called iKeepbookmarks to manage and access my Internet favorites.  I have always liked the simplicity of the interface and the ability to access it from any Internet connected computer.  At a recent conference in Alabama, I was introduced to del.icio.us  At first glance, the interface seemed confusing and I could not understand why someone would want to keep their bookmarks this way.  However, I decided to try it out to see what all the fuss was about. 

I then discovered the power of tags.  Have you ever bookmarked something and found that it could fit in many categories?  Which folder to put it in…  With del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize your links.  For example, I found an article called Does your web policy cover student sites?  This could go in my folder on blogs or AUP.  Del.icio.us doesn’t make you choose one of them or make you duplicate your efforts.  You can use tags, one word descriptors, for each of the categories and find this resource under either one!  You can also search someone else posts for related content with the same tags. 

Yahoo aquired Del.icio.us in December of 2005.   For more informationm, see social bookmarking.