In my Teachers as Online Language Learners (TOLL) project, I found most learning resources (for Korean learning) through Google searches and the ensuing rabbithole of links they lead to. On occasion, I even bookmarked them in my browser, and annotated them on my website like a good researcher should. There is nothing wrong with this, in the same way that there is nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel. It's just that it has been done before, and why would one want to do it all over again?
The spirit of Web 2.0 is all about collaboration, and information searches are one area where we all can benefit from the work that has already been done by the army of fervent internet users across the globe. Search engines, particularly Google, capitalize on previous searches and the popularity of websites to organize their searches. To draw on the searches done by those before us, though, we can capitalize on social bookmarking - the collections of favourite sites constructed by users and shared on the web. My social bookmarking weapon of choice: Delicious.
Delicious offers users the option to import their existing favourite sites or bookmarks from their computer, upload, annotate and tag new bookmarks, share with others and add new bookmarks from their browser's toolbar. The magic of this process lies in the tags. Tags categorize each website, which means that you can access your own or other users' entries under that tag. For example, a tag search for Korean led me to the wealth of sites bookmarked by other Delicious users. After adding my own bookmarks, I could easily call up my own collection of bookmarks for Korean. Of course, the same principle would apply to any topic.
What makes Delicious better than the Favourites or Bookmarks built into web browsers is that the tagging and annotation functions make it easier to browse and keep your own evaluation of sites. Then, of course, you can contribute to building and organizing the vast shared knowedge base online, and benefit from others' contributions.
Because now that the wheel has been invented, we can get on with refining the design, and discovering new purposes for it. There's no need to do it all over again.
A special word of thanks, as always, to my colleague, friend and guru Henrick Borger, whose own smorgasboard of e-learning gems are, of course, meticulously bookmarked at Delicious.
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