Using del.icio.us

I went on del.icio.us I had seen this reference on a number of sites during the past several years, and I thought it was a cute name, but I never paid attention to what this link was or even believed that a link with this name was "real". Now, through this course, I can see that a tool like this wouldl make a lot of sense for my course.

I can see using del.icio.us both at work as well as for my personal site.
At work, our group designs technical courses. Recently, most of the courses focus on MS Outlook and Excel. We have been delivering classroom training. I have been pushing a gradual (but agressive) trend towards supplementing the classes with on-line resources. (It will take a while to wean my place away from fear of the internet. Believe it or not, the majority of workers in the computer department do not have internet access. Our company likes to play "cop" because they fear that people will be surfing the web. Your typical case of a few bad apples spoiled the whole bunch!) Often, I find useful technical sites that are useful to me as I create the course manuals. (FYI - The majority of the intermediate Excel manual I am now creating was taken from already existing materials and samples on the web. Oh - forgot to mention that my group is one of the "nice guys" that gained an exception to the no internet policy. I guess I should throw a web party for the nice favor!) So, I can see del.icio.us as being a useful if not, in a sense, a necessary site to bookmark, tag, and even share all these web sites with the group.

On a larger scale, after we deliver a class course, I want our users to be self-sufficient and find answers and tips to their technical problems on their own. Many are tech savvy and want to learn. But, again, since they don't have access to the info., (again, no internet allowed) they have to call the help desk (which is what my group does in addition to tech training) to find out how to plug in a computer! Wouldn't it save a lot of time and educate them better if we delicioused (OK, I made it a verb!) a bunch of sites that could show them a video of how to plug in their computer? (Oops! I forgot, you can't view these sites unless your computer is plugged in! Shhh ... don't let this secret out! My technical job may be on the line if some of my users figure this out!)

For this site, the blog currently has manually posted links to useful web sites. I noticed on del.ici.ous there is an option that could update my blog links from my del.icio.us sites. I haven't had a chance to try this option, and I hope I correctly understood that concept. I could see that idea as being extremely useful.