Week 5: Bookmarking on EAP Courses

Bookmarking on EAP Courses

Since I mostly work with EAP students, enrolled in the English Teaching Major, I try to encourage them to sign in for an account in www.delicious.com. The benefits are many; so why not to motivate them to keep information they run into in their Web searches.

I am kind of new in the use of bookmarking Web pages, since I just began with this at the beginning of January (2010) after a course on Web 2.0 with the University of Oregon. However, since www.delicious.com is an associate service of www.yahoo.com, it seems to be mandatory to have this bookmarking service to keep track of Web searches for academic purposes. Yet, if they prefer, www.diigo.com, which is an additional service provided by www.gmail.com, students can create a dynamic page to store information on various subjects.

I started using the bookmarking service with my Oral Communication students since the second quarter 2010. In this way, we have been able to store and share sites that can be useful later on in a course or in the planning of a course in an upcoming, different college term. And now that we are dealing with the differences of marriage customs in our culture and cross-culturally as well, these bookmarking services can maximize the quality of information students can share with their peers in their bookmarking pages or in their speeches.

As a highly frequent user of www.delcious.com, I wouldn’t ask my students to limit the number of bookmarks per topic. What if they are really interested in a topic, and they want to do some kind of extensive reading of the topic? Who am I to stop their thirst for knowledge by asking them to limit the number of bookmarks they have. In addition, once the students get to use their bookmarking pages in Yahoo! Or Google, they are the ones who need to come up with their personal “mechanism” to retrieve the information (Web page) they need. A general thematic unit tag can help a lot to get to the information you look for when your bookmarking page begins to grow big.

As I get to learn from my instructors at the University of Oregon, Distant Education Department, a good way to share bookmarks is to create a wiki in sites.google.com [*] once students have created their corresponding pages. After that, you can instruct them on how they can send each other bookmarks for them to explore. This procedure is then applicable to www.delicious.com and www.diigo.com.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

[*] sites.google.com