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USING DEL.ICIO.US IN EDUCATION By Gabriela Grosseck i 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 University. 1 Almost a decade passed until the dream of the American University teachers materialized in the emergence 2 of a revolutionary way to organize the informational content available online, according to individual needs and interests, offered by social bookmarking applications. This paper will attempt to offer a first structure and a first frame for using del.icio.us the one of the most used instruments of social bookmarking in the recent history of the Internet - in education. 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, 1 Robin Good, A Delicious Way to Personalize the Web, January 5, 2004, http://www.masternewmedia.org/2004/01/05/a_delicious_way_to_personalize.htm . 2 It is believed that the era of the social web began with the launch of del.icio.us on September 15, 2003.

Using del.icio.us In Education

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Page 1: Using del.icio.us In Education

USING DEL.ICIO.US IN EDUCATION

By Gabriela Grossecki

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 University.1 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 will attempt to offer a first structure and a first frame for using del.icio.us the one of the most used instruments of social bookmarking in the recent history of the Internet - in education.

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.

1 Robin Good, A Delicious Way to Personalize the Web, January 5, 2004, http://www.masternewmedia.org/2004/01/05/a_delicious_way_to_personalize.htm.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/.

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I. 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. 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. 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 tags 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 period). Without any publicity the site reached, in September 2006, a million users5 (according to statistics on the del.icio.us blog6). 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. Recent data (June 2007)7 show that del.icio.us occupies the fourth position in the top 25 most visited social bookmarking sites.

4 Lists of social bookmarking applications/services can be accessed at Listio, eConsultant, or 3Spot.5 Other companies which monitor Web traffic show approximately the same number. See statistics from: Compete (http://snapshot.compete.com/del.icio.us): 973,908 visitors per month (USA), Rank: 1,930; Quantcast (http://quantcast.com/del.icio.us): 1,100,000 visitors per month (USA), Rank: 1,342 or Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/browse?&CategoryID=5305). Those who are interested in real time traffic can follow the del.icio.us statistics at http://deli.ckoma.net/stats.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.

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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.

II. 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. The fundamental unit of del.icio.us is the post.

Fig 1 The del.icio.us interface for my account (screen capture, 20 July 2007, http://del.icio.us/ggrosseck)

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 2), 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. 8 Del.icio.us Traffic More Than Doubled Since January, http://weblogs.hitwise.com/leeann-prescott/2006/08/delicious_traffic_more_than_do.html, August 10, 2006.9 Trevino estimated 43% outside the USA.10 http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2006/03/private_saving_.html.

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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.

Fig 2 Adding a resource (screen capture, 20 July 2007, http://del.icio.us/ggrosseck)

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.

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).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.

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

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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 engines.

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 5099 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.

III. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGESDel.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

i * Gabriela Grosseck, senior lecturer Ph.D., West University of Timisoara, Faculty of Sociology and Psychology, Department of Modern Languages and Social Informatics, 4 Bd. V. Parvan, office 029, 300223 Timisoara, tel. 0040 256 59 22 66, fax 0040 256 59 23 20, e-mail: [email protected].

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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)11.

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.

Because tagging is a very personal procedure, many users don’t know how to designate sites, which leads to different styles of bookmarking the Web. 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 spam (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 engines.

Fig 3 The users’ involvement in building the information system (source: Thomas Vander Wal,

Tagging in your Web World, UIE Web App

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 itself. Moreover, we can see in figure 4 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.

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

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

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Summit, Monterey California, slide 25, http://www.slideshare.net/vanderwal/tagging-in-

your-web-world, 23.01.2007)

because these Internet users don’t think about aggregation when they post something12.

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. 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.

And some disadvantages: Being a web service it requires an online connection. The absence of tags. According to a Pew Internet report13 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

12 It would mean attributing del.icio.us users an altruism they don’t have.13 http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Tagging.pdf.

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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 weeks14).

Information load. A big number of links and/or a large network might require more time/attention to browse through the information flow, etc.

IV. 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, del.icio.us 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). 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 and the feeling of belonging to a community.

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).

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

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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 Horizon15 report which are saved at http://del.icio.us/tag/hz07+user_content .

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 efficient.

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.

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).

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 account16. Some possible uses in education are:o creating relation networks (for instance del.icio.us network explorer17 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.);

o creating conceptual maps (e.g. with Mind My Map18 - we can explore relations between tags);

o viewing the browsing process by using tag clouds (the most popular representation is according to the size of the tag- which is proportional to the frequency);

o eye-tracking accounts (sessions of eye-tracking19 for the ergonomics of browsing, for understanding the information overload and web information patterns, etc.);

15 http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page. 16 See also http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/discussion/2.cfm.17 http://www.twoantennas.com/projects/delicious-network-explorer/. 18 http://www.mindmymap.com/.19 ViewFinder Heat Map, http://www.feng-gui.com/Default.aspx

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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.).

V. INSTEAD OF A CONCLUSIONAlthough it is such a popular service among virtual space users, in Romania too ew

educational actors use del.icio.us20. 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.

VI.REFERENCES1. Hammond, T.; Hannay, T.; Lund, B.; Scott, J., Social Bookmarking Tools (I). A General Review,

D-Lib Magazine, aprilie 2005, vol. 11(4), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us .3. Javier Cañadas, Tipologías y estilos en el etiquetado social, http://www.terremoto.net/tipologias-

y-estlos-en-el-etiquetado-social/, 7 august 2006.4. O’Connor, Brett, del.icio.us Mashups, Wiley Publishing Inc., 2007.5. Richardson, Will, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other powerful web tools for classroom, Corwin

Press, 2006.6. 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.7. Trevino, Ericka Menchen, Social Bookmarks: Personal Organization And Collective Discovery

On The Web, teză master, Universitatea Illinois, Chicago, 2006.8. Waters, Sue, Use del.icio.us for social bookmarking,

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

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