I have recently learned how to use Delicious - an online social bookmarking site. The only question I have is why the heck didn't I know about this sooner?!
Delicious is an online social bookmarking application. I'm sure that at one point or another, we have all saved a link to our "Favourites" list while surfing the Net. The only problem with that practice is that you can only access those Favourites from the computer where those links were saved. The beauty thing about Delicious is that you can bookmark your favourite websites ONLINE and therefore, you can access them wherever you have access to the Internet. Brilliant!
As an educator, this excites me because I can see an immediate benefit to using this application with students. A teacher could post all relevant links for a course for research purposes, or even course readings, making learning a more paperless and greener experience. This tool allows for learning to take place beyond the confines of the classroom and traditional, outdated, badly written and ideological textbooks. In using this application, we continue to honour what our students already know and what they can already do. For our students, cyberspace is a familiar place where they both work and play. There is nothing wrong with adding this dimension to our course if it means that our students will be more engaged and see the use of real world tools.
