I have stopped running a newsletter I used to keep for my journalism/writing students (and also freelance writers), called The Handy Job Hunter for Writers. This newsletter once offered me a place to write articles about some the issues I was teaching, as well as to connect with others in the writing profession, but mostly it was a huge dumping ground for weblinks I felt any graduating writing student or freelance writer -- including myself -- could ever need to begin the hunt. It was a collection of weblinks clustered by categories like "jobs for writers" and "writer's guidelines" and "calls for papers" and "internships" and so forth. Most of the articles I wrote for that newsletter went on to be reprinted in trade magazines or taught in some of my classes. It was a good newsletter.

I started that newsletter because I wanted an easy way to advise my students who might be thinking about careers in freelancing, or looking for markets to publish their work. I had them simply subscribe to it -- and that way I'd feel confident they'd continue to get that information even after they graduated. But there came a point about a year ago when I realized that the newsletter didn't have enough "new" material to justify sending out a new issue, and that my articles were more valuable if I didn't just give them away online like I was doing. The whole point of the newsletter was to find paying markets for writing -- yet I was giving my own specialized writing assignments away free in the process -- and slaving under my own deadlines, too, no less!

The links were really what mattered. So I began copying and pasting those links into our Course Management System at SHU -- called jweb (a jenzabar system akin to Blackboard...which we will soon affectionately call "Griffingate" at SHU). I copied them slowly and awkwardly, hoping my writing students would find the links useful. However, the links have to be copied from class to class in another slow and awkward fashion, involving a hidden copy-and-paste system they call a "bank" (but which I call a "pain"). I mean, why not offer faculty a central hub for repositing weblinks to share across the board with all the classes they teach? Why hide their links from other classes? Why use their laborious interface at all? I thought about going back to my newsletter...

But there's no need. There are plenty of other ways to centralize a page of links -- from building your own teaching website to using one of an array of bookmark-sharing ("social bookmarking" or "social networking") services. I chose the latter (and I already feel years behind the curve). I have moved those links to del.icio.us -- an ugly but useful site that is a little confusing at first in its architecture, but one that I have found more and more useful for sharing (and learning about new, related) weblinks. Here's my page:

Arnzen on del.icio.us

It has the added benefit of allowing TAGS to organize the links in intricate cross-referential ways (see Best Tagging Practices by Tagamac's Ian Beck for more information). I've informed the students in my current Publication Workshop class about my new page, but now that I've launched it, I need to start thinking about ways that I could -- possibly -- use the site in different and creative ways while integrating it more deeply into my teaching. (My reluctance is founded in the sloppy aesthetic weirdness of some of Web2.0).

So I've started looking around to see how other sites are using this weirdly-punctuated site in a productive manner for their classes, and I thought I'd share what I've found so far in case you're seeking info on this, too. In his blog post, "Del.icio.us and teaching", English professor Bradley Dilger gives a clear and articulate narrative about how he employs his del.icio.us page in his writing courses. He tags the links he wants to share with his students with the course number, which students are asked to browse. The other tags that are connected to links (by theme) give the student reader a pivot point that can spin them into further research on Dilger's course page or across the whole del.icio.us site. Neat.

One of the elements of del.icio.us that appeals to me is the ability for people to subscribe to specific tags in your profile, meaning that they will be alerted whenever you post a new link and mark it with that tag/keyword. Thus, del.icio.us could be used to assign weekly readings and alert students to updates (one educator's site I read calls this "Homeworkcasting" and invokes rss feeds to send new posts to a secondary del.icio.us page dedicated to a class). Kaye Sweester also recommends finding teachers in your same field and adding their profiles to your del.icio.us "network" in order to be alerted of what your colleagues are doing. One could easily, I think, also work in reverse and have the del.icio.us site be a repository for class research generated by the students themselves, building a network of profiles that interconnect between individual student profiles.

Quentin D’Souza -- who runs the great educational resource website Teaching Hacks -- has a good del.icio.us page for me to turn back to later, as I try to learn more about creative ways of using social bookmarking in my classes.

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