New Delicious?

As a new user of Delicious my first impressions of the old interface of this website was that it very busy and not so user- friendly. The software is great for storing web links with annotations, which has significant potential for use by secondary school libraries. The expansive range of websites that could be used for educational purposes, is a valuable resource that school libraries can effectively harness via Delicious. Websites can be critically evaluated by teacher librarians, relevant web links can be annotated and stored in delicious, for quick access by staff and students, on the library web portal. The tagging feature of delicious enables librarians to classify each link in a multiple categories so that users can locate it, via a keyword search, from a number of different access points. For example, it could be tagged with the curriculum topics (i.e.  ‘medieval castles’) and in the subject of ‘history’, and for ‘year seven’ students,  as well as  ‘humanities’. The librarian could also place the tags of ‘medieval castles’ and ‘history’  ina tag bundle for ‘year seven’ or for ‘humanities’. The tags make it easier to share links with other members of a group of colleagues, which has been great for my distance education studies. 

The new interface of the website is clearer and less cluttered.  Although it is not initially obvious how to save links, it is fairly intuitive for most internet users to go to their own link, on the top right hand corner of the web page.  However, I agree with Judy O’Connell’s comments that it would be good to still be able to use a tag cloud and RSS feeds on the new Delicious (2011, Heyjude). Librarians could now create a ‘stack’ of links on a particular topic with images that can be easily accessed by students when researching for an assignment. The ‘stacks’ video is more promotional than practical, it does not provide ‘how- to’ instructions. Despite this, when I began to create a ‘stack’ of my own, the prompts appeared to guide me through the process and the links and images uploaded quickly. The only shortcoming I found, with the stack creation process, was that it did not allow me to add my own image, which would be great for presentation purposes and could make it more appealing to users who would like to add their own personal touches. However, stacks provide a simple way to collate links, on one topic, to share with students. Richard Byrne notes that stacks provide a visual way for students to explore links and he suggests that they could create their own multi- media playlists of links. (2011, freetech4teachers.com).

The “beta status blog” has been set up so that users can ask questions or provide feedback during the transition to the new interface. I found it to be helpful to read others queries and to find out what improvements are being made in response to the initial teething problems. For example, since the new delicious was launched, I was initially experiencing the dropping out that was reported by other patrons, who are using Mozilla Firefox as their browser. The beta blog contains a status update and suggests steps to follow to rectify the problem, but it also encourages users continue to report any future problems that occur. For this reason I feel confident that the new delicious will continue to improve, knowing that it is a work in progress.

O’Connell, Judy. (Sept 28^th, 2011). Social Bookmarking not so Delicious. Heyjude. Retrieved from

http://heyjude.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/social-bookmarking-not-so-delicious-anymore/

  

 Byrne, Richard. (2011,Sept 27th). What’s delicious doing now? Making stacks. In freetech4teachers.com. Retrieved from http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2011/09/whats-delicious-doing-now-making-stacks.html