Exploring Business Technologies: del.icio.us

The Exploring Business Technologies course in the Business and Information Technology curriculum involves students studying applications and careers in various fields. One tool to aid students in their research of careers is the del.icio.us social networking service. It allows individuals to tag and annotate web sites, effectively sorting them in conceptual categories. Students can also set up and join networks of their peers to view and share saved sites. If a teacher establishes a standard set of tags before students begin their research (e.g., "marketing_firms"), after students tag sites with the same term, they can pull up all the sites their classmates saved under that term (e.g., http://del.icio.us/tag/marketing_firms). This strategy would support collaborative research around an assigned topic or career.