THE ROLE OF DEL.ICIO.US IN EDUCATION:

CREATING SIGNIFICANT LEARNING EXPERIENCES

senior lecturer Gabriela GROSSECK, Ph.D.

University of the West Timişoara

Faculty of Sociology and Psychology

Department of Social Informatics

4 Bd. V. Parvan, office 029

300223 Timisoara, Romania

tel: +40-256-592266, fax: +40-256-592320

email: ggrosseck@socio.uvt.ro

Abstract

“Surfing the net, which is more and more complex, has become one of the main obstacles in

efficiently using the network. This is mostly due to the disorganized nature of the Internet, in

collections of sites and documents whose quick and exponential growth rate leads to difficulties

users have to face in order to find their way out of the online informational maze. There are two

possibilities of coping with this complexity: either the structure of the Internet is reorganized, or

every user is offered the ability of systemizing an individual perspective of the network. Although

the first option would probably bring more benefits on a global level, the second is easier to achieve

and has immediate advantages for the individual user or for a group of users.”

These lines can be found in a paper from September 1994, published by Michigan State University1. Almost a decade passed until the dream of the American University teachers materialized in the

emergence2 of a revolutionary way to organize the informational content available online, according

to individual needs and interests, offered by social bookmarking applications. This paper explores

the use of social bookmarking with del.icio.us as an instructional tool in an online classes, with

students from the University of the West, Faculty of Sociology and Psychology. A first structure

and a first frame for using del.icios will be presented, including questions for further research.

Key words: del.icio.us, social bookmarking, teaching and learning

� Before starting to structure the observations regarding the educational opportunities of the most popular

social bookmarking application, we have to make a few remarks.

� Firstly, “bookmark” literally means “something you put between the pages of a book so that you can find that

page again quickly”. As far as del.icio.us is concerned, “bookmark” means favourite (preferred/of interest)

link (site/resource). Because it’s a lot easier to identify it in its original form I shall use it as such.

� Secondly, from a technical point of view, all references made in the article hold true for the FireFox v2.0

browser and its extensions (of course there are alternatives, like IE or Opera for example, but I prefer

Mozilla’s browser because it is “faster, more reliable, and totally customizable to your online life”3).

� And thirdly, because the space allotted to the article is limited, I have chosen to include a minimum number of

figures / screen captures.

INTRODUCTION

It is generally believed that a bookmark is a copy of the URL of the computer on which we

work (in the folder Bookmarks/Favorites of the browser), and that it designates a virtual place

where resources of any type (web pages, media files, or any other online entity) can be later

accessed/downloaded. Social bookmarking is an online means of storing, classifying, localizing

and sharing these Internet resources, according to individual needs and interests4. However,

del.icio.us has become very popular (especially with non-technical users) because it represents a

simple way of identifying, organizing, classifying and sharing sites. In addition, it is free and can be

accessed anywhere in the world where there is an Internet connection based on an account which

requires only basic information to be created (user name, password, and email).

Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) is a free Internet social bookmarking service, a special

software for identifying, organizing, storing, finding, classifying and, at the same time, sharing

favourite web resources, not only among browsers and work places, but also among people. The site

appeared at the end of 2003 and now belongs to Yahoo (but any Internet user can still resort to the

system).

In 2001, Joshua Schachter, the wall Street analyst (considered the youngest innovator of the

year 2006 by the Technology Review magazine) realized he had a big problem with his online

resource collection, initiated at the beginning of 1990 and called MemePool, because it comprised

20.000 items. So, he designed a small MuxWay application which allowed him to classify links by

attributing short one-word descriptions to resources. Soon after, a thousand users had already

visited his site, which determined Schachter to consider developing the application in the best

interests of Internet users. Thus, in December 2003, MuxWay was replaced by del.icio.us, one of

the few services which managed to metamorphose the information on the Web: from a mere

collector of links, del.icio.us turned into a resource organizer.

The name of the application was chosen to underline the need for using a simple and

efficient instrument to organize web pages, but also its American identity (the last two letters .us

stand for the first rank Internet field, just like we have .ro).

Since Yahoo bought it in 2005 (for approximately 30 million dollars, according to rumours

in the press at the time), the number of users has rapidly increased. For example, only between

January and July 2006 (according to HitWise), the traffic increased by 122% (but it had a slight

decrease in the following period5).

Without any publicity the site reached, in March 2007, aprox. two million users (according

to statistics on the compete.com – see figure 16). Thus, only three years after it appeared in the

virtual space, del.icio.us managed to convince users of the advantages of being included in such a

community. Data from June 20077 show that del.icio.us occupies the fourth position in the top 25

most visited social bookmarking sites.

Figure 1 del.icio.us traffic (timeframe: 01/2007 to 01/2008)

source: http://tinyurl.com/2ubgnl

But, perhaps the most interesting aspect is represented by its demographic profile. Studies

carried out in 2006 by LeeAnn Prescott8 and Trevino showed that most users were male (59%), 30

years-old on average, having high incomes, coming from urban areas or suburbs9, tending to have

higher education and to be familiar with technology from a young age. As the site’s inventor

himself stated, the great majority of del.icio.us users are bloggers, programmers, educational actors

(teachers, librarians), persons interested in constantly discovering interesting sites and in showing

them to others too.

WHY USE DEL.ICIO.US?

The del.icio.us homepage gives an overview of the current resources (hotlist and tags to

watch), and this constitutes the starting point for browsing through the most popular/recent posted

links. To view one’s own collection of resources (after signing in), one has to click on “your

bookmarks”, in the top left corner. A user’s collection can be found at the address

http://del.icio.us/username. The fundamental unit of del.icio.us is the post. Just as in the case of

blogs, these are in reverse chronological order.

Figure 2 The del.icio.us interface for my account

screen capture, July 20, 2007, http://del.icio.us/ggrosseck

The use of del.icio.us is facilitated by the option of configuring the toolbar of browsers by

adding the TAG button “Bookmark This Page”. There are numerous applications which follow the

social bookmarking path, both for links (furl, ma.gnolia, diigo), academic articles (connotea,

citeULike), and for blog posts (Technorati), images (flickr), news (digg), maps (Frapper,

Wikimapia) or for annotating audio (Odeo) and video podcasts (Youtube) etc.

Let’s see some of this system’s facilities:

1. Creating one’s own collection of web resources, classified according to key words

(tags), in an unstructured or freely structured manner. The common user thus has the possibility of

creating an extraordinary online content library. When adding a resource (Figure 3), we specify the

URL, its description, (Name), personal observations (optional, Notes - maximum 255 characters),

Tags - one or several, space separated. The resource can be public or private (the option do not

share was introduced experimentally on March 19, 200610

).

The procedure of recording the resource being loaded in the browser is facilitated by the

configuration of the tool bar, namely by the bookmarklet “Bookmark This Page”. In this way, the

URL fields and the site’s title/description are automatically filled in the addition form. This form is

based on Ajax and, when we fill in the tags, it lists some Recommended Tags, which are tags used

by other users when they bookmarked the respective resource. Moreover, if we click on any of these

they will appear in the tag field. Similarly, if we start to type a tag, all the tags of that user which

start with those letters, will be listed under the form, in order of frequency, to make their selection

easier.

Figure 3 Adding a resource

screen capture, 20 July 2007, http://del.icio.us/ggrosseck

The operation of giving a tag is called tagging. This can be of different types. For example,

in Google it is named “bookmark”, whilst other sites offer such options so easily that the user

doesn’t even realize he/she is already following the procedure.

Figure 4 History of tags

source Keller, 2007

11

A user’s collection is found at the address http://del.icio.us/username and has the RSS

http://del.icio.us/rss/username (in fact, any del.icio.us page allows an RSS subscription). At the

address http://del.icio.us/username/tag we find the resources of the username, saved under the

specified tag. At http://del.icio.us/username/tag1+tag2 we find the resources characterized by the

specified tags, tag 1 and tag 2.

2. Managing marked information (saving resources from other users, deleting them etc.).

Del.icio.us can be considered an editing instrument, with the help of which every user slices the

web in his/her own manner. Del.icio.us offers several ways of managing the resources in one’s own

collection: on the resource page, from the browser’s menu, with the help of the TAG bookmarklet

etc. The latter provides more options: information about the date of the post, most popular tags; the

field Keywords offers a shortcut to the URL of the posted resource; we can delete the resource

straight from the editing window.

We can follow certain users’ collections and sub-collections, characterized by tags, by:

� subscribing to the RSS of the users’ collections, if we know they search information about

fields of interest for us too;

� adding them in our own network by using the option network (at

http://del.icio.us/network/username we find resources added by all users from username’s

network);

� subscribing to certain resources which we specify by using the option subscriptions (at

http://del.icio.us/subscriptions/username we find other users’ resources, characterized by

particular tags).

3. Personalizing. Social bookmarking offers all users the possibility of making their lists of

relevant websites public, or of keeping them private. Other users can access these resources and can

choose to save them. In this way, every user creates his/her own vision of the Internet, according to

the nature of the network, which isn’t an organized entity, but an entanglement of sites (the changes

performed don’t affect other users).

4. We have three search options on del.icio.us: one’s own collection, the general links

library and the Web. Thus, del.icio.us used as a search engine allows: finding other useful tools,

subscribing to the interesting ones, filtering resources for personal use (not only can we browse

through the links of any user who decided to make their resources public, but we can choose only

those which correspond to our own interests). It also allows searching files of a certain type (for

example, we can localize video files which refer to Web 2.0 by writing on the address bar:

http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:video+web2.0). Sometimes, del.icio.us collections prove more

efficient in localizing web resources than Internet search engines12

.

5. Finding information/Research. Del.icio.us is, essentially, a social bookmarking service,

an excellent system for archiving favourite information on the Internet, following hot topics and

new resources from certain fields, discovering other new sites and/or exploiting other persons’

collections. The real strength of del.icio.us resides in a certain form of “collective intelligence”,

because new information is always added, revised and filtered. Thus, the so-called architecture of

participation is set up.

6. Evaluation. Yahoo bought del.icio.us (an important marketing move for the company,

similar to the acquisition of Flickr), and this led to a massive increase in the number of users and,

implicitly, in the quality of the stored sites. A resource is considered important if it is stored in more

del.icio.us accounts, and we can notice this by looking at the number of persons who added the

respective resource (which is attached to each link). Thus, the number of users who saved a certain

site becomes an indicator of the respective resource’s value/utility/notoriety. If we click on the

counter which indicates the magnitude of the resources, we access the respective users’ collections

and the tags under which they had saved the resource. For instance, the resource Open Source

Windows, from del.icio.us/ggrosseck collection, was also saved (at the time this article was written)

by 6855 users. If we click on this number, we get the list of the respective users’ collections, and we

might find other useful resources (a common resource may indicate a common interest field).

At del.icio.us/popular we find the resources saved by most users, and at del.icio.us/tag we

find the most used tags; these pages can be followed through RSS (the tags underlined in red can be

found in our own collection).

Unlike classic search engines (Google, Yahoo), this system has the advantage that the

importance of a resource is established by a person, not by an algorithm.

7. Collaboration/Communication. Although the facility “your network” is correlated more

to the bookmarks saved by Internet users than to the users themselves, we rely on the

experience/opinion of these people we have included in our circle of users and who have already

evaluated the respective resource (users can choose to include persons with similar interests in their

network by attributing them the quality of “member”, or mere “observer”, called “fan”). “We are

joining forces to build my vision of creating a way for people to remember things together. It is a

shared-memory site”, Joshua Schachter said. The great advantage of this service is thus represented

by the increased trust users have in the utility and accuracy of the resources saved by users from

their network. We can communicate resources either by “links for you”, or by attributing the tag

“for:username”. The Internet user to whom we are sending the resource should be a del.icio.us user.

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES

Del.icio.us is not a revolutionary service (we’ve had social bookmarking applications for

over a decade) but the novelty it brings, which overturns everything we knew about interaction with

the Web, is the possibility of classifying online content according to our own vocabulary. The

activity of tagging website addresses or resource representations (in fact any object which can be

identified by URL), according to the users’ own criteria, is called folksonomy (folk+taxonomy)13

.

It is believed that this collective and spontaneous way of freely indexing Internet

information offers a partial solution to the semantic Web.

Although folksonomy promises to redefine surfing/searching the Web, the most acute

problem of del.icio.us is precisely dividing the information on the Web in categories (the three axes

of del.icio.us are users, resources and tags). Schachter didn’t impose any rules as far as tagging is

concerned, but he left it up to the users’ latitude to establish the taxonomy of online resources.

Basically he did what Web 2.0 stipulates: he gave the power to the users.

Some popular examples of collaborative tagging systems (other than del.icio.us) include:

StumbleUpon (tagging for URLs), Flickr (tagging for photos), LibraryThing (tagging for books),

YouTube (tagging for videos), citeulike (tagging for academic articles), Amazon (tagging for retail

products) etc.

Because tagging is a very personal procedure14

, many users don’t know how to designate

sites, which leads to different styles of bookmarking the Web15

. Javier Cañadas (2006) suggests

four styles of tagging for del.icio.us users:

1. The selfish style. We tag only according to our individual context. Our tags have personal

meaning (only for our own benefit), are irrelevant to other users and difficult to place in the

social context of the del.icio.us network of users (for example, Oliver, for Tiya, etc. are tags

which indicate resources saved for my husband or for my daughter). In time, it is possible

that this type of user will classify content under generally accepted, more theme-oriented

tags. This doesn’t exclude selfishness, but attributes a certain social utility to tags. The

social benefit of such a classification consists in the user’s maturity.

2. The friendly type. We tag for the people we know: friends, colleagues, project partners, etc.

This style is typical both for large groups and for small ones. The social benefit is great and

the motivation lies in belonging to a group, in the desire to share with others what you

know, to contribute to online content.

3. The altruist type. We use tags as general as possible and as many as we can for a resource.

We try, using key words, to describe as objectively/realistically as possible the resource that

we post, so that it is of interest to the great majority of users of the most popular social

bookmarking service. The social benefit is huge because it involves generosity.

“Recovering” information is easy because we understand the notes attached to the post and

we are able to interpret the tags. Motivation is low because it involves a lot of work and no

benefit.

4. The popular style. Popular tagging is used in order to get more views. There is absolutely

no social benefit. Such tagging is considered spagging = spam+tagging16

(we find resources

marked with top10, sex, interesting, etc.). This tagging procedure is considered artificial and

is disapproved by the rest of the users because it reflects the tendency of some marketers to

get a better position in the lists of results posted by search engines17

.

Each of us has his/her own style or a combination of styles. It depends on the context, on the

time when we tag, on the motivation we have for posting a link, etc., but especially on the link

itself18

. Moreover, we can see in figure 5 that personal value is more important than network value.

If a thousand people save a link, it means that link is valuable and has personal relevance.

Figure 5 The users’ involvement in building the information system

source: Thomas Vander Wal, Tagging in your Web World, UIE Web App Summit, Monterey

California, slide 25, http://www.slideshare.net/vanderwal/tagging-in-your-web-world, 23.01.2007

We can’t support the idea that social use is associated form the beginning to a resource

because these Internet users don’t think about aggregation when they post something (it would

mean attributing del.icio.us users an altruism they don’t have). Moreover, a universal tagging

system will not be enough unless individual mechanisms of correction exist as well. These should

be based on knowing the motivation and style of tagging of users. In this case, we’re already talking

about a professional type of labeling, which contradicts the folksonomy promoted by del.icio.us.

Obviously, del.icio.us has benefits and limitations. We shall only mention some of its

advantages:

� Independence from a platform. Neither the operating system, nor the browser is important.

We have those small buttons which can be installed (the configuration of the tool bar is done

from the browser).

� It is easy to use: we don’t need to save addresses or to have special knowledge.

� Ubiquity: sites can be saved and accessed on any computer with an Internet connection,

anywhere in the world.

� Malleability: as any good structure, it allows users to convey information socially, by

getting individual associations of concepts and disseminating them publicly.

� Serendipity: social browsing leads to finding useful links/collections.

� Collective intelligence strengthens the synergy of del.icio.us.

� Flexibility: del.icio.us allows us to create a personal library of resources which can (or not)

be tagged, classified in several categories, shared with others, taken from others, and can be

published as web links or RSS on blogs or personal sites, or exported as HTML file, etc.

� Creating dynamic learning communities and/or communities for people with similar

interests: del.icio.us allows users to create a personal library of resources which can be

tagged and bundled, shared and “borrowed” from others, posted on blogs or on personal

websites, tracked by RSS, etc. Basically, the tagging process becomes social interaction:

both expressing oneself in the del.icio.us community and reflecting the community in

oneself.

� Because it supports a public API a huge number of tools19

have also been developed for

del.icio.us: Deliciousspy, cloud.lic.io.us (for Mac Users - OS X desktop tagclouds), del.ick.r

(mash-up showing the photos and links for your keywords, a tag-cloud from del.icio.us, and

a tag-cloud for each photo), deliGoo (is a nifty new add on for Firefox 2.0+ that mashes up

del.icio.us with Google Custom Search) etc.

And some disadvantages:

� Being a web service it requires an online connection.

� The absence of tags. According to a Pew Internet report20

only 28% of American Internet

users place web resources in a category.

� The impossibility to control vocabulary. Tags aren’t subjected to any hierarchy which gives

del.icio.us a chaotic and ambiguous character. There are those relational tags which classify

categories according to common URLs, but because the data base belongs to the users there

is no standardization. The popularity of del.icio.us increased precisely because of its

system’s flexibility, fluidity and lack of control imposed by a certain taxonomy.

Furthermore, because tags can create confusion (London can be a link to the tourist map of

London or to a volume by Jack London) it is advisable, from time to time, to reorganize

(rename, include in other categories or even delete) tags.

� Inconsistency of terms. It is best to choose a category after exploring those which already

exist in the network. In other words, nobody is saying that the tag “educatie” (education,

engl.) isn’t good, but it limits the access to the links only to users who speak Romanian.

Moreover, as long as we don’t decide otherwise, links are public and placing the online

resource in a category which wasn’t tagged properly can cause problems (“enemy” for our

office colleague, for instance).

� Merging tags and eliminating the singular-plural dichotomy: “blog”, “blogs”, “blogging”,

“blogosphere”, etc.- instead of using four tags, it’s better to use just one.

� The evolution of language (synonyms, writing with or without spaces, with or without

capital letters, using or not the underscore, using a certain language, etc.). Because there

isn’t a distinction between capital and small letters we have to be extra careful when we tag

- within phrases we either use the underscore or we unite words (e.g. social_bookmarking or

socialbookmarking, and not social bookmarking, because that results in two categories:

“social” and “bookmarking”).

� The lack of precision: misspelled terms, superficiality, uncertainty, incorrect placement in

several categories, etc.

� Del.icio.us isn’t literally a social network, centered more on people than on the data. For

instance, the only way of creating a profile is to include a link to your own blog or page,

which makes it difficult to find persons with similar interests. Social aspects have room for

improvement and that can be achieved, specialists say, by including comments, groups, etc.,

even URL clusters (something like Flickr) or recommended links. “It is not only about

helping people find each other according to the interests that connect them, but doing that in

a certain context”, Joshua Schachter underlined. However, the beauty of del.icio.us lies in its

simplicity and efficiency, which is why the envisioned social upgrade remains a peripheral

function to most of its users.

� There is no real competitor on the market, its interface still has lacks, actualization isn’t

done in real time, the clients’ service is defective (some users complain that they receive an

answer to their requests only after a few weeks21

).

� Information load. A big number of links and/or a large network might require more

time/attention to browse through the information flow, etc.

HOW CAN DEL.ICIO.US SUPPORT TEACHING/LEARNING?

Starting from the aspects described above, I shall only give a few recommendations for

using del.icio.us in the learning process, which any educational actor could adapt to his/her own

context:

� Firstly, since del.icio.us is web-based, it is useful for those who work on several computers,

such as students at the faculty or in campus/hostels, teachers at school and at home, etc.

These can mark their favourite books, films, and music, they things they want to blog; they

can use the categories del.icio.us offers for planning a trip, participating in a conference, as

addenda for their CV, etc.

� Support for lectures (additional bibliography, URLs for course readings). Tags from the

personal collection can be recommended to students attending various courses as sources for

research for producing a paper (article, report, project, etc.). Better said, the students can

subscribe using RSS to certain categories (all accounts and tags have RSS associated to

them).

� Mechanism for building learning communities. During each lecture we can establish

together with the students a tag (which can be followed with the help of RSS in the browser

we prefer) which will be used for the resources we consider useful (for other users these tags

might not have any significance). Students can be invited to contribute to this link archive.

In addition, they start to recommend sites to each other, thus contributing to the lecture’s

resources. There are at least two immediate advantages: a) the link data base is enriched year

after year and remains available to students even after they graduate, whilst the teachers

have richer resources for the next academic year and b) after the course finished those who

are interested can use the tags in order to stay informed. This allows breaking the barriers

between formal and lifelong learning. Moreover, it can increase group cohesion, the feeling

of belonging to a community and the power of community knowledge.

� Research. The same mechanism, exchanging resources through unique tags, can be chosen

when we collect useful resources for projects, especially if we have foreign partners, and

when we communicate with students who work on their dissertation or MA paper. On the

other hand, one of the most interesting challenges addressed to researchers is the way in

which people understand the information they find on del.icio.us and how they can

transform it into knowledge. Sometimes, it’s a bit difficult to decipher posts, especially since

we find them in all languages, and they may not have tags or notes attached. Furthermore,

because del.icio.us is an open-source utility, both teachers and students who have

programming knowledge can improve the code according to their own interests (for

example, delicious.href.ro is a Romanian project, licensed according to the GNU terms of

General Public License). “In this approach, students are scaffolding their own knowledge

and the teacher is working as a facilitator, instead of a sage on the stage. This also makes

del.icio.us an organic learning tool, evolving with the interests and needs of the learning

community”.22

� Support for individual or group projects: students/teachers make comments, tag resources

with quality notes, share links, etc. In this way, the “audience” of our del.icio.us account can

increase (you never know what authority in the field can subscribe to the link archive) and

the students/teachers become credible sources of information, “evangelists” of knowledge

(the more open the networks, the better the quality of the information content).

� Editing educational material. Del.icio.us can also be used as bibliographic aid for editing

magazines, journals, books, etc. For instance, the publishing service of JISC’s e-Learning

Focus initiated a public account at http://del.icio.us/elearningfocus, where its subscribers

can access a series of sites or the resources which lay at the basis of the Horizon23

report

which are saved at http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07+user_content. Another example is represented

by the possibility of creating “mini-tests”: to each link, instead of associating a description,

one can post a question in the Name field. The students’ answer (which relies on reading the

information on the web page) will be written in the Notes field. They will also attribute

appropriate tags in the Tags field.

� Mechanism for informal, formative feedback. The teacher can discover what the students’

needs and interests are by following their accounts: what tags they use, how they annotate

and classify the resources, etc. Having such an indicator of what students are looking for as

far as learning resources are concerned, the tutor/lecturer can make teaching much more

efficient24

.

� Developing content management abilities. First of all, storing a web resource is in fact a

cognitive, constructive activity (it is weighed whether the resource is important, whether it is

worth sharing with others, and so on). Secondly, tagging, including the link in categories

and writing notes about it represent a qualitative analysis of the resource. Together with the

documentation alert through RSS, this can only bring benefits to students who have

problems learning: it helps them organize; it engages them in the learning process, etc.

� Deliciously as part of professional development or as part of a school or district teacher

development program. del.icio.us is suited to work as a facilitator, providing users with the

tools to chunk, scaffold, and organize knowledge in a format that best suits them25

.

� Social tagging allows the development of colloquial language because students familiarize

themselves with using their own words both for describing and for searching online content.

� For the educational actors who have a blog, del.icio.us offers a series of options which allow

posting the most recent links on the blog (linkroll, tagroll, daily blog posting, etc.). Bloggers

love to make public the sites they saved (in addition, this brings a dynamic touch to the

blog). Publishing daily lists of links in this way gives a blogger an opportunity to 'micro-

blog' about items they've read but haven't wanted to or had the time to write a full-length

post about, and to add another regular stream of content to their blog26

.

� Based on del.icio.us tags, diagrams can be generated. These graphic representations

materialize either in presenting content under a different form (another interface for

instance), or in mixing content with other sites and getting the so-called mashups (for

example, digglicious lists the most popular links on the basis of contents from digg and

del.icio.us). Or, it can focus only on visual exploitation of a single account27

. Some possible

uses in education are:

o creating relation networks (for instance del.icio.us network explorer28

is a means of

exploring the social side of del.icio.us- we can see the links between accounts, the

interactivity, how bundles are created, etc.);

Figure 6 The overlapping networks of Britt Watwood, Eduardo Pierano and mysel

(upper left corner), as of November 2007

The image above comes from a delicious explorer

29

of bwatwood, emapey and ggrosseck del.icio.us accounts (Watwood, 2007)

o creating conceptual maps (e.g. with Mind My Map - we can explore relations between

tags);

o tag clouds (the most popular representation is according to the size of the tag - which

is proportional to the frequency) for knowledge representation30

:

o for individual and class sets of student papers / essays

o for speeches and lectures

o for analyzing the content of websites

o of classic pieces of literature

o generated from set of stories covering the same news event.

o eye-tracking accounts (sessions of eye-tracking31

for the ergonomics of browsing, for

understanding the information overload and web information patterns, etc.);

o geo-tagging- viewing links is easily and rapidly done by assigning coordinates to a

link (latitude and longitude), in order to visualize it on a map (e.g. the places where we

go on holiday or to conferences);

o and many other applications (we can follow the interests of the user vs. link popularity,

the space of individual links, diagrams with recommended links, etc.).

In graphics, what matters is the diversity and freedom to choose a certain way of

exploring (maybe the most important aspect is that del.icio.us follows the power law,

namely 20% of users have control over 80% of the posted links (Vilfred Pareto’s rule)

INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSION

Although it is such a popular service among virtual space users, in Romania too few

educational actors use del.icio.us32

. This mostly happens because of the mistrust in the new social

bookmarking technology and of the lack of interest (particularly because they lack knowledge and

aren’t’ familiarized with the Web 2.0 applications). I hope that, eventually, the subtle, flexible,

pertinent and convincing character which rendered del.icio.us unique among social bookmarking

services will determine its adoption in educational activities.

On the other hand, the practical exercises with my students for almost a year provided me

with an opportunity to embed delicious within their learning environment. In doing so, I believe my

courses was stronger due to its use. But as Britt Watwood (2007) says: “More research will be

needed to understand the long term implications”.

REFERENCES 1. Cañadas, Javier, Tipologías y estilos en el etiquetado social,

http://www.terremoto.net/tipologias-y-estlos-en-el-etiquetado-social/, August 7, 2006.

2. Hammond, T.; Hannay, T.; Lund, B.; Scott, J., Social Bookmarking Tools (I). A General

Review, D-Lib Magazine, April 2005, vol. 11(4), http://tinyurl.com/ox5tm.

3. Holotescu, Carmen; Grosseck, Gabriela, Curs de RSS şi bloguri în educaţie, online course

www.timsoft.ro, March 2007.

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us.

5. O’Connor, Brett, del.icio.us Mashups, Wiley Publishing Inc., 2007.

6. Peirano, Eduardo, Networking with del.icio.us in education, 24.10.2007,

http://onlinesapiens.com/blog/2007/10/24/networking-with-delicious-in-education/.

7. Richardson, Will, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other powerful web tools for classroom, Corwin

Press, 2006.

8. Seldow, A., Social Tagging in K-12 Education: Folksonomies for Student Folk, 2006,

http://mrseldow.gradeweb.com/custom/Social_tagging_in_K12_Education_Seldow_4_3_06.pdf

9. Trevino, Ericka Menchen, Social Bookmarks: Personal Organization And Collective Discovery

On The Web, master thesis, Illinois University, Chicago, 2006.

10. Waters, Sue, Use del.icio.us for social bookmarking,

http://aquaculturepda.wikispaces.com/delicious.

11. Watwood, Britt, Instructional Uses of Social Bookmarking: Reflections and Questions, in

Romanian Journal of Social Informatics no. 8 / December 2007,

http://www.ris.uvt.ro/Numarul%208%202007/Watwood.pdf.

Notes:

1 Robin Good, A Delicious Way to Personalize the Web, January 5, 2004, http://tinyurl.com/2eup9.

2 It is believed that the era of the Social Web began with the launch of del.icio.us on September 15, 2003.

3 http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/.

4 Lists of social bookmarking applications/services can be accessed at Listio, eConsultant or 3Spot.

5 Lee Rainie, PIP Tagging, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Tagging.pdf, p.4, 31 March 2007.

6 http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2006/09/million.html.

7 Top 25 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites, 6/09/2007, http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-bookmarking.html.

8 Del.icio.us Traffic More Than Doubled Since January, http://tinyurl.com/yrtr2h, August 10, 2006.

9 Trevino estimated 43% outside the USA.

10 http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2006/03/private_saving_.html

11 Philipp Keller, Tag history and gartner hype cycles, May 12, 2007, http://tinyurl.com/ywe94z.

12 Yahoo is testing the integration of del.ici.ous into Yahoo search results pages. Some users will see the del.icio.us icon

as part of their normal search results, which tells them how many people have bookmarked those pages, as well as the

tags people have supplied for those pages (http://tinyurl.com/2wxn8z/). 13

Folksonomy is a recent term, introduced by Thomas Vander Wal, http://www.vanderwal.net/. 14

Sinha, R., A social analysis of tagging, January 18, 2006, http://tinyurl.com/25n4m4. 15

See the game ESP (http://www.espgame.org/), developed by Carnegie Mellon University (Liz Lawley, Social

Consequences of Social tagging, January 20, 2005, http://tinyurl.com/yhd33b). 16

Szekely, B. & Torres, E., Ranking bookmarks and bistros: intelligent community and folksonomy development, May

2005, http://torrez.us/archives/2005/07/13/tagrank.pdf 17

Jamais Cascio defines “fauxsonomies” as folksonomies gamed by “metadata added with the conscious intent to

confuse or obfuscate,” or to weight them for spammish reasons. (David Weinberger, Fauxonomy, June 3rd 2007,

http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/2007/06/03/fauxonomy/). 18

Yahoo! released the top 10 del.icio.us tags for 2007, and with they exception of "music" at #4 and "travel" a #8, they

are exclusively related to technology (Josh Catone, Surprise, Surprise: Delicious Still Not Mainstream, December 5,

2007, http://tinyurl.com/2r7rmx). 19

Huge lists can be found at http://web2.econsultant.com/social-bookmarking-services.html and

http://mashable.com/2007/08/31/delicious-toolbox/ 20

http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Tagging.pdf.

21

http://kylescove.com/2007/07/01/ultimate-guide-to-using-delicious/. Personally, I received it after only one day! 22

http://teachers.yahoo.com/document/62102 23

http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page. 24

Chris Pirillo propose „freedbacking” for a positive feedback, http://tinyurl.com/3ajvzm, June 23 2006. 25

http://teachers.yahoo.com/document/62102 26

Belan, M., 10 tips for integrating your del.icio.us links into your blog, http://tinyurl.com/2vdrty, 2008. 27

See also http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/discussion/2.cfm. 28

http://www.twoantennas.com/projects/delicious-network-explorer/. 29

Milan Matull and Michael Schieben, http://www.twoantennas.com/projects/delicious-network-explorer/. 30

Jeff Nugent, Tag clouds as heuristics, Feb 4, 2008, http://techne.edublogs.org/2008/02/04/tag-clouds-as-a-heuristic/. 31

ViewFinder Heat Map, http://www.feng-gui.com/Default.aspx. 32

Or other social bookmarking applications which are useful in education (diigo, connotea, citeULike, scuttledu, etc.)