OLJ Using Delicious

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I had already setup a Delicious account for ETL 401.  Set it up, but made poor use of it.  In fact, no use at all.  I found it confusing and clunky, and not at all intuitive.  I’m not enormously technically mindful, but I’m not an idiot either.

So I approached Delicious with a fair amount of skepticism about its potential usefulness to me.  I also had to set up a new account, because I am trying to make my librarian persona online consistent, so use a different pseudonym than I do for forums or game playing.  This is library me on Delicious (https://delicious.com/jelmoy).

Even as the course draws to a close, and I reflect on my learning, I don’t think I have discovered or used delicious in a way that realizes its potential as a networking tool.  I have used it though, to help me organize my research for assignment 2 – and have used tagging reasonably effectively, that I am able to locate the things I need.  At the end of assignment 2, I was not faced with the monumental task of gathering together all of my resources and writing them into a list of references, I kept on top of that as I went along, and even managed to keep them reasonably alphabetical.  Any reference that slipped through the net without a URL was easily located from my delicious bookmarks.  This was a huge improvement on my previously haphazard and highly stressful approach to referencing. 

I also used Delicious to check what others had labeled inf506, and that yielded some gems as far as assignment writing too.

My other heavily used labels are for teaching resources.  Even if I don’t have my own laptop with me, using Delicious means that those bookmarks are available to me wherever there is a computer, or even from my phone. 

I feel that there is much more I could do from a networking point of view than I have currently managed, and from feeling very dubious about the worth of delicious, I am much more positive. 

Earlier in the semester I wrote that I was bad at tagging, but I have forced myself to do it, and I’m pleased with the result. 

In a school environment, it could be used in a way that allowed students access to their teachers bookmarks, it could be used for staff to share ideas and resources.  The advantages are obvious - information is easily accessible from anywhere (home or school), it is organised and it is not going to get lost.