Community Linking: Shared Knowledge
You’ve probably heard of social networks. MySpace, FaceBook and YouTube get lots of press, good and bad. And of course there are blogs and wikis and community linking sites.
"Community linking sites," what are those?
Ok, that one may be new to you. But not for long, it's the topic of this Bit Literate Guide.
Social linking is easier to understand after you've seen it. So here are two links you can try. Play around, look at some of the sites, and then come back and learn why this is a great tool for adult learners.
http://del.icio.us/escsciencetools (opens in a new window)
http://del.icio.us/escmathtools (opens in a new window)
You've just explored two separate accounts on the community linking system called del.icio.us. And you may very well be thinking, "lists of links to web pages, big deal."
In fact it is a big deal. You can use a service like Del.icio.us it to create a library of always-available links to Internet resources. The links you save to your account are on the internet, so don't constantly have to remember what computer you were using when you want to find a saved link. At a basic level, Del.icio.us provides a fast convenient way to save your bookmarks to an Internet server.
But it's not where the real power lies
The real strength of the community linking concept lies in the use of keywords called tags. (see the separate guide on Tagging for more on this topic). When you add a site to your online account, you can provide a list of tags to use to relocate that site in the future. And you can add any tag you want, whatever pops into your head.
But you can also draw on the collective wisdom of the Del.icio.us user community. When you add a site you see the list of tags other users have assigned to that same site. It's common to see tags in the list that make good sense, but that you would not have thought of. This feature also makes tagging fast because the most obvious tags will be in the list and you can apply them by just clicking on them, you don't have to type them in.
And there's one additional benefit. You can search the delicious database to find all the sites that were saved with a given tag. The more people who have tagged a site the higher it is ranked so you can easily find the best sites for a given topic.
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