I was first introduced to delicious last summer and have been adding bookmarks bit by bit ever since. Recently, however, I have found that when I try to add a new bookmark, I am not able to simply paste in my copied URL. Delicious used to take me to a separate page to add my new bookmark. Now a small window pops up with a place for the new URL to go, but I am unable to right click and paste it in. This has been very inconvenient. I shared my troubles with a coworker and she introduced me to Diigo. I was able to import all of my bookmarked sites from Delicious to Diigo easily. Diigo has become my preferred social bookmarking site, which allows for highlighting and sticky notes to be preserved on the sites I want to save.
I find social bookmarking a godsend! So often I would surf at home and find great sites and bookmark them on my computer there. Then I would get to school and wouldn’t have access to those sites when I needed to recall them. The same would happen at school when I wanted to retrieve something at home. Delicious took care of that problem immediately, of course. Now no matter where I am, I can access all of the sites I have collected. The tags help me find whatever I need quickly instead of having to scroll through URLs that may or may not hold meaning for me. So first of all, the value is for me personally to keep all of my resources organized and readily available to me anywhere I may be working.
Another way that social bookmarking can act as a valuable tool is by informing parents of my delicious or diigo account. So often parents want to know what good math sites are out there for their son or daughter to use to practice their math facts, for example. Instead of repeatedly jotting down a few or putting them in my newsletter or even providing individual links on my webpage, I think I need to just give parents my delicious.com address so that they can have access to all of the sites I have found to be valuable. Then they can search the tags and hopefully create a delicious account of their own and collect sites that are useful to them and their children.
As for the definitions of Instructional Technology, or should I say, Instruction Design and Technology, I was surprised by how far back the field dates. I certainly have not thought of it existing in the 1920s. I’m old enough to remember film strips in elementary school and even mimeograph copies as opposed to “Xerox” copies. I even witnessed the operation of the strange cranking device in the backstage area of our school’s cafeteria. How far we have come! I can also recall the TV weatherman using an actual board to illustrate the forecast—no green screens and animations! I certainly didn’t think of these things as “technology” back then and it makes me smile now to think that those things were the advancements of the time.
I was also taken aback by the fact that there hasn’t been one definite understanding of the field, but with such ever-changing technologies and needs in education, I can understand the varied and shifting perspectives. I suppose that my own views have tended to focus more on the media and the devices that help students learn. This past school year, however, I have been thinking of educational technology to include those things that facilitate teaching as well as learning. With all of the things that are expected of teachers, I have been trying to find ways that technology can help me manage my duties and responsibilities as a teacher. I am constantly needing more hours in each day and simply more of ME. I think of educational technology in terms of how it can provide me with ways to stretch the resources of time and energy. I think that this component to my definition of the field is covered in the terms of “facilitating learning” and “managing appropriate technological processes and resources” as defined by the AECT in 2006.
I like that the definition applies to areas of instruction outside of the field of education. One reason I am entering this field is so that I have skills that can apply to the private sector should I ever chose to, or am laid off from, public education. “…intended to improve learning and performance in a variety of settings, particularly educational institutions and the workplace.” includes the business setting for educational technologists. Reiser’s and Dempey’s definition appeals to my desire to have a degree and skill set that will transfer from the field of education if I ever need to make such a shift in my career.
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