Week 6: Thing 13

My basic instinct on programs like delicious is that the majority of my use of the internet is 1) sites I go to all the time making features like RSS helpful or 2) I need to look something up so I search for it, find it, read it, and am done with it. Rarely are there sites that I need "sporatically". However, there are some sites I use from year to year with a particular reading assignment and I save those to my favorites. However, with the fluid movement of the web, I often find that things I bookmark are gone, changed, or irrelevant by the time I need them again a year later. I can see where this could be a good way to share information; however, I think the rollyo (if it actually worked) is a better concept for use in the classroom. I did find some really interesting articles on the library website that I enjoyed reading, but beyond that, there wasn't much functionality here that I could use in a classroom. As far as personal use, I see RSS as a much more promising feature. Rather than teaching websites like this that will come and go, our real goal should be to teach students how to do searches online. Very few of them know how to look anything up. Teaching them about keywords, realiable websites, and good search techniques will prove much more useful in the real world than taking them to the "digital waters" to drink from. If we do all of the searching and organizing for them, they won't know how to do it themselves.

One last thought: I was reading the "effective habits of delicious users" and one of the suggestions was to add sites to your RSS. In essence then, isn't this just one "middle man" step in the process to RSS?