In my line of work, "Making the link" is all about finding partner schools in the UK or overseas with whom you're going to work collaboratively. Here, however, it's going to take on a different meaning.
I check emails, tweets and forums several times a day (or often more than several times!). There are lots of helpful people out there who pass on lots uf useful stuff. Towards the end of last term, I started to find a lot of new websites that I wanted to keep to refer to later, and started to copy and paste the URLs into a Word document called "read this!" which I kept on my desktop. A few days ago I noticed that this document was 9 pages long. I knew that I had to do something with this list of websites but wasn't exactly sure what.
Then yesterday I clicked on a link on one of the forums which led to someone's Delicious links. Delicious is something I'd been aware of before but which I had ignored as I didn't see the point at the time. Yesterday, though, I quickly realised that this would be an ideal tool to use to sort out my many pages of useful websites.
So what is Delicious ? "Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source." So it's an extension of the process of adding bookmarks to your individual computer when you're surfing the net.
Signing up was a piece of cake, and I also installed the Internet Explorer toolbar, which makes adding links very easy. So much easier than pasting into Word, and I can access my links from anywhere with an internet link ! I think the most useful thing is the tags, which allow you to search your many links quickly and easily.
You can see my links so far here. I'd be very interested to hear from folks who have been using this for a while, especially if you have been using it for more than just a storage point for the links that you've found. I know that this is old hat to a lot of people, but I figured that if it's new for me, it'll be new for others too.
