Using Del.icio.us in the Classroom Environment

Again, like with my Google Docs post below. I always am eager to recommend the use of Del.icio.us in any educational environment. Anytime I do research on a topic, I come across lots of useful resources and tools and always look to share those with my colleagues and classmates. Del.icio.ous makes it really easy to do this. You can instanty save links and mark links to share with users in your network. 

For using it in the Social-Software class I would make one suggestion. When studying web2.o applications, more imporant than setting up lots of accounts on different services. Studying web2.0 is really about studying what people do with the services they use, how they customize thier experience. Chief among all these is content! It's hard to get that depth on something kjscils598f08 just set up 10 minutues ago, let alone have any real depth of content. It has no history, no major customizations and really doesn't tell you that much about that user other than what they could set up in 10 minutes. Thats what social-software is about users and thier content, not how to set-up user accounts. So the challenge is trying to bring that experience into these accounts that users are setting up for purposes of the course. 

So I suggest when implimenting del.icio.us as part of the user introduction to "Social-Software" to really get the best use out of it you need to instruct current users on how to import thier previous del.icio.us bookmarks to thier "new" user "scils598" accounts. This is what I used to make my "scils" del.icio.us account have more breadth and thefore hopefully provide a richer user experience.