Web 2.0 and Emerging Learning Technologies/Delicious

'''What is Delicious? Its features'''

Internet bookmarks are records of the address of an Internet document on your computer so that you can find it again easily. As a feature of all modern Internet Web browsers, their primary purpose is to easily catalog and access web pages that a user has visited and chosen to save in his computer.

Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks and allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from the centralized source. In this way, it is easier to have a simple set of bookmarks even if you are not on your own computer.

Delicious has a hotlist on its home page and popular and recent pages, which helps to make the website a conveyor of internet memes and trends.

It has many features such as website’s simple interface, human readable URL scheme (In computing a Uniform Resource Locator specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it, for example www.delicious.com), a novel domain name (For example, del.icio.us), simple REST-like API(An application programming interface is a set of functions, procedures, methods or classes that an operating system, library or service provides to support requests made by cmputer programes), and RSS (RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format) feeds for web syndication.

Making use of this service is quite simple. First, you must create an account and then you are ready to post and share. Best of all, the use of delicious is free.

Teaching and learning possibilities

A social bookmarking service provides users the ability to record (bookmark) webpages, and tag those records with significant words.

When teaching any topic students can build up collections of records with common tags, and users can search for bookmarked items by likely tags. It is also a good device for group work, which can be aided by having social software available.

For example, all the students in a class can tag and bookmark different webpages about a specific topic and then, they will be able to read them at home and so, the following class, they can comment on the topic or work with it.

Another instance of bookmarking would be that the teacher is the one that tags and saves in delicious and students have to find her bookmarks and read what she want them to read.

Examples


 * Everybody's Bookmarks- Delicious

http://delicious.com/search?p=elt&u=&chk=&context=&fr=del_icio_us&lc=0

In this site you can find an extensive list of elt bookmarks.


 * ESL bookmarks on Delicious

http://delicious.com/tag/esl

In this site you can find a list of bookmarks related to ESL and activities.