THE FCE BLOG by Claudia Ceraso

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Bookmarks are Tagtastic!

How can our bookmarks bring us together?
We all love surfing the net and discovering great sites. Then we bookmark in our browsers to find them again, we want to share with friends via e-mail (so last season!) and then... chaos. You like bookmarking so much the collection of links is unmanageable. Or worse, some computer crash makes you lose months of work at collecting! Ouch.

Wouldn't it be great if we had access to the bookmarks of people round the world studying the same you are trying to learn? Wouldn't you like to contact people who have saved the same sites you did? Like-minded people around make a difference.

Ok. Let's do it!
The trick is this. Forget about the Internet as a source of information. The Internet is folks trying to learn just like you. When we decide to share, we can create a meeting, a folksonomy. We can find each other.

Two key words here:
a) Del.icio.us -the tool. You'll need an account.
http://del.icio.us/
b) Tagging -the action. You'll associate key words to your favourite sites. What they are about and why they are important to you. Rule for good tagging: The more, the merrier!

In this 3-minute video you will see where, why and how to tag.



Video source

Del.icio.us for us is fantagtastic!

I've always loved bookmarking. I think it was my first natural step towards online learning. Apart from my fceblog account to connect with teachers, I have created an account for my class. You can find it here:
http://del.icio.us/tagtastic

My students are creating their accounts and joining our network. If you are a student, save the FCE Blog in your bookmarks, write a message in the description box and we'll find you.

Would you like to see what we are doing?
Here is our wiki page on bookmarks.

So let's tag away!


Special thanks to ijohnpederson for helping me shape this idea.


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7 Comments:

  • Hey Claudia, this is a great resource and very well put together. I am starting to get a few teachers tagging in delicious at my school and will point people to your site as well. Thank you

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At 9:31 pm  

  • Thank you, Jo. Glad to hear teachers from Australia will be visiting. If they have some online presence, remind them to associate a link to their del.icio.us account (>Settings >URL). Notice most people add the network widget to their blog sidebars, but not their blogs to their del.icio.us page. Googling the username may lead to the person, though. Hope the new del.icio.us version will make all this more evident.


    (*whisper* I haven't forgotten I am tagged for a meme...)

    By Blogger Claudia Ceraso, At 11:23 pm  

  • Dear Claudia,

    You're always a source of inspiration! I've just added your post to the pageflakes I created for my students to learn a bit about bookmarking. Thanks for sharing!

    Regards from Key West,
    Carla

    By Blogger testecarla, At 4:13 pm  

  • Thank you so much for sharing your class bookmarks and course del.icio.us account!
    http://del.icio.us/listeningplus
    Properly tagged already. Now we know where to turn to for podcasting resources.

    Our classes are linked -even if we are not dealing with the same topics right now... What does this say about the power of folksonomy? What does this imply for sharing between several EFL classrooms?

    So Key West and Buenos Aires already inter-linked. Let me coin an expression: To be precise, we are inter-tagged.

    Any other takers?

    By Blogger Claudia Ceraso, At 5:08 pm  

  • More delicious stuff here:
    http://del.icio.us/dtruss/delicious
    (this post included:-)

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At 6:15 am  

  • Claudia,

    Hi.... I also want to say a few words about Buzka www.buzka.com which I have on EFL Classroom.....

    I think it is a great "visual" alternative for bookmarking. But you are right, delicious is delicious precisely because it is a "banquet".

    But I like 'em cause they are a small Australian company going for the big idea....I'm always for the underdog.

    I hope to keep up with your fine blogging more often!

    By Blogger abracadabra, At 9:57 am  

  • David Truss
    Thank you for your resources. Regarding your comment in the previous post
    http://fceblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/vocabulary-feeds.html
    I'd love to know more about how you use del.icio.us with your students.

    David Deubelbeiss
    I have been exploring 'Buzca'. I wish del.icio.us allowed us to save without installing buttons as Buzca does. I agree it looks very good on eflclassroom20.ning, but I wonder about its sharing possibilities.

    Del.icio.us lets us know about the person by their research, how they comment on the sites saved or simply browsing at the list of their interest areas. It is enough information to know whether you need the contact in your network.

    To my students and readers,
    Hey, these people commenting here are my teachers -by choice. Glad to share this space with them!

    By Blogger Claudia Ceraso, At 12:24 pm  

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