#22 Pass it On.

I helped our part time Reference Librarian, Jo-Anne, to use del.icio.us to catalog "ready reference," or "quick information" websites for use by our patrons. She learned quickly. At first, del.icio.us can be confusing for newbies, because the navigational links are on the right instead of the left (bad design, I think). Also, if tagging is a new concept, the logic behind it may not seem obvious at first. Del.icio.us also takes a little while to update itself sometimes, especially once a new bundle has been added. At first, this problem caused some difficulty, because it made it look like the work we'd done to bundle our tags didn't really work. Once I showed Jo-Anne that all she had to do was reload her page (sometimes, 2 or 3 times), it made sense. A lot of del.icio.us users don't use bundles to group tags into clear categories, and I know why--bundling can be tedious, but it is useful, especially for what Jo-Ann and I are attempting here. The most important thing when teaching Jo-Ann to bundle was to let her know that a tag to be grouped into a bundle should already exist, before the bundle is created, because a bundle won't show up unless tagged items have been categorized within it. Take a look at Jo-Anne's work here: http://del.icio.us/Quick_Information.

I also taught some members of the faculty about del.icio.us, and I pointed them to our DNLworkshops del.icio.us page at http://del.icio.us/dnlworkshops. I learned something from them in doing this. First, that we always need to include the name of whatever resource we're teaching about AS A TAG, and second, that we have too many descriptive tags, which they find confusing. KISS is the rule here.

I look forward to teaching more people about various web 2.0 tools, and I'm sure I'll get the chance!