Week 7, Thing 12: Bookmarking tools (Delicious)

I start this post with a confession. I had a Delicious account before, once.

The least part-time, and longest-lived, of my several part-time jobs is as a lecturer at Birkbeck College, where I teach on an Internet based distance learning MSc course in structural biology. (You don't need to know anything about structural biology to understand this post - essentially it involves the techniques that are used to discover the three-dimensional structures of proteins and other molecules and to understand how these relate to their biological function.)

A random(-ish) protein structure
This one's myoglobin, found in red blood cells, and the first protein structure to be solved.
In 1958.

Back in 2007, I was awarded a small grant from London University's Centre for Distance Education to explore introducing various Web 2.0 based tools into that course. Some of the tools I tried worked very well. I still maintain the course blog, which manages a rather higher hit rate than this one. But Delicious... no. I set up an account, shared it with the students, and asked them to save bookmarks of structural biology research sites they liked (there are lots to choose from... like this one...) But I don't think a single link was saved. Maybe I should have set it as an assessed exercise.

Maybe, also, I should have set up my own Delicious account before I started using it in teaching. At that time, I couldn't think of anything I, personally, would want to do with delicious (or any other social bookmarking tool) that I couldn't do with my browser's memory and Google. I'm still not quite sure. Two things, however, have encouraged me to give this another go. The first, obviously enough, is this course. The second is reading David Weinberger's excellent book Everything is Miscellaneous, or "the power of the new digital disorder". Published in 2007, this book says nothing about Facebook or Twitter at all, but it allots five index entries, some multi-page, to the power of Delicious. The site's creator, Joshua Schachter, is quoted there as describing it as an "amplification system for your memory of websites".

So, four years and (at least) one change of ownership for Delicious later, I now have an account again. And, so far, about a dozen bookmarks with associated tags. My user name is the same as my Twitter username: Clare_Sansom.

A few bookmarks

I'm still not sure exactly what I will come to use Delicious for, or how much use it will be to me in my professional life, but I'm finding it rather fun to explore.