del.icio.us

Another wonderful online tool is del.icio.us (https://delicious.com). This is a website that facilitates social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is a form of collaboratively bookmarking web pages. The great benefit of del.icio.us, is that when one finds a website that they find beneficial, one could simply upload the webpage to this site. This allows one to easily retrieve or upload the bookmarked pages from any device that can access the del.icio.us, which can be accessed either through the internet or its app. In the era of multiple phones, tablets, ultra books, laptops, and desktops this saves you the time of trying to remember which device you bookmarked the webpage in. Unfortunately, the app is only available for iPhone users, leaving the rest of us Android, Windows, and RIM users out of luck. Another benefit of this site is that it allows you to tag your bookmarks, therefore making it easy to search your information by keywords. This enhanced feature becomes even more beneficial if you have multiple projects you are working on, since one bookmark can be linked to each of the separate projects that it is relevant to. This then open the doors for you to share or even join networks of people that may share the same interest, some of which may have done a lot of the basic to extensive research for you. A drawback of this is that each member tags (or adds descriptive information about) their bookmarks in any way that makes sense to them. This may mean that you may not benefit from their wealth of knowledge if you are not using tags that match theirs; at times causing you to loose valuable golden nuggets of wisdom that may turn out to be your lost Holy Grail. Even though the website isn’t without its limits, one can see that there are numerous aspects that can be of benefit for the research or education phases. Not only will you have one reservoir for all your bookmarks, but you have the benefit of seeing others’ reservoirs as well. During the research phase it gives you a direction to walk towards and for teaching the easy access to your key information which can easily be shared by your students.