Delicious

I am already an avid fan of using delicious (thank goodness they changed it from del.ici.ous or whatever it was, because the anal in me no longer has to type it out including all the fullstops anymore).

If you want, check out my site:
http://delicious.com/crystalh.choi

I found it really useful when I was teaching, as the YouTube training video explained. Teachers are forever looking for great websites, teaching resources and ideas, so it was a really good way of sharing the sites you found with other teachers. I also found it really nifty that you could search other sites that had been tagged with the same tag, which led you to other useful sites. The only problem is, the other person who had tagged it needed to have used the same tag name as you. I think this is a common problem that we will all encounter (I hear you Kate!) and the librarian in us won't be able to stand not having a uniform way of catalouging websites. Someone needs to come up with a uniform set of tagging rules, similar to the Library of Congress classifications!!!! Who knows, this may be an incarnation of LC dewey decimal classifications in the future (I can see it now: those volumes of subject headings will be replaced by digital versions that have the original Dewey classification number, along with a delicious tag that catalouguers assign to each record!!!)

I have also found it useful to bundle tags under umbrella subjects. For example: I bundled all of my English-related tags under the umbrella bundle of English.

In terms of the use of tags in an academic setting, I think it would be useful for tagging professional organisations, or subject-specific websites that would be useful to students. We could make this a collaborative effort with our academics. As they might have useful websites that they use in lectures or for tutes, we could liasie with them and make links to the delicious clouds for these subject-specific sites. For example, while I was at Curriculum, we actually created links to all of the websites referred to in a HSIE course reader on the teacherwiki. Rather than do this, we could create a delicious account that allows more flexibility and social networking opportunities.