Cool Thought: A Delicious Flickr

I recently joined Flickr and Delicious. For anyone who doesn't know what these sites are about, Flickr is a place to upload and share photos while Delicious is place to save and share bookmarks on the web.

If you're itching to see what photos and bookmarks I've shared and can't wait till the end of this post, you're in luck:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zham61/
http://delicious.com/zham61

I'm an avid Facebook'er, so I post all my pictures on there. Everyone I know uses Facebook so I don't really have a need to use Flickr. If I need to host a picture, video, etc my blog already does that for me as well, so once again I find myself in the same place as many people on the web--trying to sort through all the substitutes for a particular need. Sorry Flickr, but Facebook fills my needs (for free, I might add).

Now Delicious is a pretty interesting idea. I remember waaaaay back in high school, that's right folk, back in the 90's, Yahoo had a service that could save your bookmarks. I never used the service, but I sure thought it was a cool idea. Oddly enough, Delicious and Flickr are both owned by Yahoo. The obvious benefit of Delicious is that you can access your bookmarks anywhere in the world on any computer that has the internet (I don't think you'd be using bookmarks if you didn't have the internet, but anyway). Delicious is more than just saving and sharing bookmarks online, you can "tag" bookmarks with particular labels called "key words." If you select a keyword in Delicious, one can see all the web pages that have been tagged by everyone on the site. Pretty neat eh?

Now you're probably thinking, how could I use these sites for an educational purpose (I suppose if that 'you' Dr. Wiley, than yes)? Well I'm about to tell you! The obvious use for Flickr at an educational level, is for posting photos dealing with a particular lecture or using the slide show feature as a teaching instrument. What about Delicious? I'll use an example from one of my classes I'm taking this semester (No not Honors 295).

Suppose a professor at university assigned his/her class, as part of their regular curriculum, a research paper who's topic had to do with the subject matter of the class. In this particular class, all students picked their own topics, but had to do with a general area of study. The professor has this assignment for all of his/her sections and gives the same assignment every semester for the same class, and teaches three semesters a year. This professor decides to creates a Delicious account where he/she bookmarks some sites/online articles that would be helpful for students picking topics and gives those bookmarks a unique tag that identifies with the class and additional tags that identify with individual topics. As students use this resource to find topics and information for their research papers, they find additional interesting sites/online articles and with their Delicious account, bookmark them with said special tag and additional tags based on topics. After a few semesters there exists on Delicious a living, breathing, database that has to deal specifically with topics discussed in that particular class. Wow, I should get paid for these ideas, or someone should, wait I think someone did.

Gabriela Grosseck wrote a very good article on the use of Delicious in education, entitled,"The Role of Delicious in Education". Of all the things that she said, the product insight that she discovered that I thought was most interesting, is that Delicious creates an environment through tags where people discover new things they wouldn't have otherwise. This is especially true when considering Popular section of Delicious.

What are some other ways one can use Delicious or Flickr for education? (This is your cue for comments.)