de.li.cious

I've been using de.li.cious for a while, mainly because my bookmark folders were getting unmanageable, and I had a vague notion that sharing some bookmarks with students or colleagues might be a good idea at some point. Right now I am working with an outstanding graduate student in our department (are you reading this!) who is shadowing Visual Culture and Language. She is an experienced blogger, great with LMS, Facebook, etc., but she hadn't used de.li.cious. We decided to do some "team-tagging" (or tag-teaming?), and see what we could both learn about the service and its potential.

Right away, I looked at de.li.cious in a whole new light. My VCL tag (for Visual Culture and Language) is helpful to me, but nobody else! I did not take a social or rhetorical approach to tagging. It looks like I could rename that tag, but for now, I think we will keep it, which, when looked at from a different light, could be particularly relevant to students (this semester or in the future). I have asked Melissa to use this tag, and we talked about what we should use as tag for hybrid classrooms. I think "blended learning" is the preferred term, and sure enough, when I did a de.li.cious search for blended learning, I got some good and relevant hits. When I did a search for hybrid, I got a lot of cars.

Both tags need additional tags, like "photography" and "film" to go with VCL, and "blogging" or "LMS" to go with "blended learning," but even as I was realizing that, my approach to tagging started to seem logical, rather than random. There might be something to this folksonomy stuff, besides a new buzz word.

Don't get lost in my cloud!