Folksonomy

This week my assignment for my online class was to create a Delicious account and play around with this system.  Before I ventured too far into this new territory, I looked at a few of my classmates' posts.  The first one I saw was one student voicing her frustration with creating so many different usernames and passwords for this class.  My first reaction was "part of our job as Teacher-Librarians in the school will to be technology and media specialists so we should be open to experimenting with technology."  So I went on to create a Delicious account and fiddle around with the tagging and searching.  Then I came to the part of the lesson to write my reflection here, in my blog.  I now sympathize with my classmate who feels like we have a lot of different accounts to create for this class.  It took me 20 minutes to get logged on here.  I forgot my username - I tried as many as I could think of; in the process I was reminded that this is not the first blogspot.com blog that I have created... I found one from 2008 that was attached to a different username (I really did try all the usernames I thought I would ever have used).  It brought back many memories - the entire two posts that I did almost 5 years ago now!  Finally I figured it out - thanks to recovery email addresses.

But I digress... onto my reflection of delicious.com:

This website reminds me of a more sophisticated Pinterest - useful for information and research, rather than just hobbies, interests, and ideas.  It allows users to navigate the web and then bookmark websites to their own personal account on Delicious.  When you save a website, it prompts you to "tag" the website.  It seems that users will tag websites with whatever terms are most meaningful to them, but there are some more common, or universally used, tags.  I began by googling "technology in the classroom."  I came up with a few good blogs and teacher's websites.  I narrowed my search by adding "grade 1" in the search field.  When I found some websites that I would like to come back to sometime in the future, I added them to my Delicious account.  I started tagging them as "classroom technology."  Then I moved to looking up "websites for kids," and "websites for grade 1."  When I wanted to save these websites to my Delicious account, many of them had suggested tags.  This must mean that other people have already tagged them and these were some of the common terms used.  When I went back into my Delicious account, and I tried to search for other websites that had the same tags as mine, I found out that I was tagging wrong.  It wasn't best to tag "classroom technology" but rather to have one word tags, but multiple tags.  So I switched them to "classroom," "technology," and "blog."  Then I added more specific tags to the websites for kids I had saved, such as "spelling," "math," and "education."

The problems that Noruzi mentioned about using folksonomy (a non-standardized categorical system - commonly known as "tagging") such as the tags not being a standard set of terms such as can be found in the Sears List of Subject Headings were not such an issue for me.  As a patron of the library for many years, both public and school libraries, I never knew the "correct" subjects to be searching for.  I always just used my best guess, and if that didn't yield the results I was hoping for, I tried a different term for my subject search.  This does not seem all that dissimilar from the way that I would search for tagged websites in Delicious.  This is the way that I would find the more common tags for the same topic that I am saving to my account.  I can easily change a tag if I find a term that I prefer to the one that I created for myself.

As for the content that is on Delicious, well that is the same for me as it is with any internet search - beware of the author, creator, and do not take any content as fact without confirming it using further research.  It is always interesting seeing what other people find who are searching for similar things as I am.

Overall, I really enjoyed this lesson, and may even continue to use my Delicious account - that is, if I can remember my username and password ;)