Comments on: Del.icio.us and teaching

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Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:17:24 +0000

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By: Dean

Dean — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 18:40:34 +0000

ENG 480 (G). That was first graduate class when I was studying for my first M.S. It was taught by Bruce Leland. How can I forget those Mickey and Minnie socks he wore?

Glad to see the class still has interest. I learned a lot from the readings. I still have the link to the syllaweb.

Dean

By: Chuck

Chuck — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 17:33:06 +0000

Thanks for bringing this cool webapp to my attention. I’ve been looking for something to round up all my loose bookmarks on various work and personal machines. This was just the ticket. The fact that it’s highly modular and programmable brings tears to my eyes.

Now if only I can collect my tags into a sensible format and not into something that resembles my cd collection.

By: cbd

cbd — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 14:17:23 +0000

Yeah, it’s not that different. But del.icio.us solves a problem I’ve had for a long time—keeping one repository of bookmarks, given that I work on quite a few different computers over the course of a day. This provides the exigence to actually use it all the time, and that adds the kind of value that students can extract when they look through my tags. It’s easy to use and lends itself to all kinds of integration with other things through its RSS feeds. So it is an extension, but a very profound one.

One thing I should add: I’ve also thought about URLs I type in instead of pull up through bookmarks (and there are quite a lot of them). Should I spend the time to add these to my del.icio.us?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 14:50:39 +0000

I’ve had somewhat of a mixed reaction to the Shirky as well. On one level, it feels like a fundamental epistemological shift is underway–at least that’s the feeling I get from Shirky, but then in practice the tagging sort of just feels like an extension of keywording/moving through information. I’ve been thinking about this with the categories options for drupal, wondering what value might come from asking students to make and then populate the categories, but I’m also just not sure I have a handle on the whole process.

By: cbd

cbd — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 14:10:53 +0000

More on the convenient and cool side, I think. Students didn’t do much tagging since it was my del.icio.us and not too many of them started their own accounts. (Is there a group version of del.icio.us?) Quite a few were skeptical, too, about setting aside classification; reaction to Clay Shirky’s “Ontology is Overrated” was very mixed. We’ll be working more with tagging in my New Media course this semester, when we do digital photography, and I’ll be interested to see what happens there.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 12:44:44 +0000

Nice to see this example of applying social software to teaching. Stepping away from old habits is such a challenge, for me. Was there any sense that students felt like they were wrestling with a whole new way of knowledge making, or was it more along the lines of convenient/cool way of researching? Also, did you find that the process was one in which students eventually took over the activity, doing most of the tagging? Did they do anything group related as well with tags?

By: John

John — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 19:26:35 +0000

Yes, thank you. This is very cool and helpful.

By: senioritis

senioritis — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 18:18:45 +0000

Thanks so much for this account; I’m really going to have to think about these possibilities for my fall courses.