Is this del.icio.us?
Submitted by jinierrichetti on Sun, 2007-02-25 21:44.
While listening to Gabriel Lundeen’s Screencast - Tagging, Folksonomies and the Collective Consciousness of Online Communities, I started thinking how hard it is to teach my 5th graders proper search techniques when using a search engine. For the most part, I try to steer them to websites that I already have posted on the school’s website for their research. Most students ignore me and insist on using Google. Sometimes they find something, sometimes they don’t. At the beginning of the school year, these students were required to do a Native American research project. It was really the teachers’ baby, my part was just to show them how to do a bibliography. But when I saw their search strings, I stopped everything and began showing them how to search properly. This is a very hard concept for them to understand. Being librarians, I think cataloging and categorizing become second nature but I ‘ve had kids tell me the key word in the question “Who was Thomas Jefferson?” is “who”. I just did a del.icio.us search on Native Americans and recognized some websites and saw others that would be completely worthless for students. So, I guess the point I’m making is, why should someone search del.icio.us and get even worse results than they do with Google? I understand that del.icio.us is organized by people and Google is really just a bunch of dumb robots searching the web. But if my fifth graders can’t do a proper search (and a lot of people’s reading/intelligence level isn’t above 5th grade) how do we expect regular people to form proper tags? Don’t get me wrong, I love del.icio.us and intend to use it and I think it has it’s place. But if I tried to get my staff or students to use it, I think they would say they would rather use Google. Or, maybe I am missing the point completely. If so, please tell me.
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jinierrichetti, I think this
jinierrichetti, I think this is a very valid question and one I have struggled with. To my mind uses for sites like del.icio.us are found more in the collective bookmarking aspect behind the implementation of useful tagging. I agree that a straight up search of del. can be less satisfactory than the Google Borg and others... but what about pointed, specific tags? At conferences I have attended, we have decided to use a tag to link each other to photos ("ASIST2006", for example). The idea is to get folks to think about who might be searching for resources and tag them accordingly, not just to suit the person's own collection of resources (bookmarks). So, for your 5th grade module on TJ, you tag chosen resources as "5thThomasJeffersonjinierrichetti2007" (I am just coming up with this off the top of my head, obviously you'd come up with something better), "5thHistoryjinierrichetti2007", and so on. You can then point students and colleagues to specific URLs based on the tags and, wonderfully, combinations of tags.
The next step, as I see it, is getting colleagues to start doing the same, and soon a "folksonomic" system develops to link like sources to one another. It isn't fool proof, but I think you get the idea. But if used well, it begins to be a more focused approach to searching, where people are considering other users and uses as they bookmark. Unlike google, and other search engines dependent on hit and KW frequency as well as other commercial search result ranking methods.
I am an avid del.icio.us
I am an avid del.icio.us user, but I almost never search the site. I mostly use it to store just about anything I think I would want to find later. I also have a few people in my network, people whose links I want to see, and that can be very valuable.
I think it was Liz Lawley who said "I don't care what all of del.icio.us tags as 'funny,' but I do care what my funny friends tag as 'funny.'" That's a great thing about del.icio.us, is forming a network of people whose bookmarks you are interested in.
Exactly! Looking at
Exactly! Looking at del.icio.us as way to produce great examples of collective bookmarking makes sense. Think about it as another form of a pathfinder. Possibly you and the teacher could collaborate in tagging some great bookmarks that are project or class specific. Students could also be assigned to contribute and this would be a great tool to help boost thier search term strategies. This could keep building and provide some really rich information. Good Luck!
Like Jenn said, I think the
Like Jenn said, I think the real power of del.icio.us is in the ability to select the best resources and then make them available to others (on del.icio.us itself, via RSS, or syndicated on a webpage). You could tag things for your class (even adding annotations in the description field) and then syndicate the resources on your Website or on the sidebar of a blog.
I don't think most people use del.icio.us as a search engine in the same way they would use Google. Most people tend to browse by tags to see if they can find other interesting items in their areas of interest. Google finds things based on text in the document, while in del.icio.us, you find things based on what other people have said this page is about (aboutness). Also, the webpages you find in del.icio.us are things that people were interested in enough to bookmark, so you can see that as a tacit statement of its interestingness. Just like in Google, there is no promise of quality in the resources you find and you must decide for yourself whether the resources are quality of not. When I look under the tag "wiki" for articles and resources about wikis, I often find things that I would not have easily found on Google and they are bookmarked by people who are interested in wikis.
No matter what tools we use, we should be teaching students to be critical of what they find on the Web. We have a role in finding the best resources for our students (for which del.icio.us is great), but we also have a role in teaching students how to choose the best resources themselves.