I'm Hooked, Let's Go!

The possibilities of usage are like a waterfall, continuously flowing. Delicious sounds so easy to apply with the folksonomy of tags. Teachers can collaborate with others to develop sites related to their field. Students can track their work for research purposes. I can add the tags to the library blog for curricular development. One example I can see is when teachers approach me to say 'do you have any good websites on poetry', I can direct them to the delicious tag that has been accumulated on my blog (under construction) and suggest they access it add to it as well. We can then share this with the other teachers and have a whole community of input. How exciting is that! These are but a few of the immediate usages I can foresee in action. On the flip side, what if they don't buy in.

Here's a questions for you. If it's usable, practical and it makes sense, how do we sell this concept to our colleagues who are still in the web 1.0 world? The notion of having students not only gather information from the Web but also put information out into cyberspace may raise some red flags for them. In Go With the Flow: Selling Social Networking, Boule suggests to establish a student policy that "details a specific process for disciplining rule breakers, [with] follow through". This way staff and students are on the same page as to what the expectations are. Boule also suggests the practicality of using delicious where if there were only one account, you wouldn't know who the (potential) offender to inappropriate material might be. Therefore, students should have their own accounts "(making sure that it in no way relates to their actual name)". By sharing solutions, I hope to alleviate the fear of the unknown in this new domain. Let's get on the same page as our students and open up into a whole new world - literally.

Source

Boule, Michelle. (2008, Jan). Go With the Flow: Selling Social Networking. School Library Journal. New York. Blog 11/1/2008. Retrieved from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6610498.html.