I’ve heard a lot of people talk about networking and being tied into a larger community of teachers and students. Most of these people have been using Twitter to do that, a web application that still doesn’t quite make sense to me.

No, I haven’t networked in Twitter, but I discovered that I did in Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, in other words it’s a site where you can bookmark the cool sites you find around the Net and then share your list with friends or students. I’ve used it many times with my classes to steer them to appropriate websites for whatever it was I wanted them to research.

Del.icio.us gives you the opportunity to monitor the links of other members of its site, your network is what they call it. I monitor four other people’s links. I heard about their del.icio.us link collections on Internet discussion areas and decided to take a look.  They proved to have some interesting material and so I have discovered several good links by seeing what sites they add to their collections.

What has been kind of thrilling for me was that I recently discovered I have three “fans” who monitor the links I add. Hopefully they’ve gained a few cool links from me, too.

I don’t know any of the people who I “observe” nor those who are my “fans.” Yet (as far as I know) we’re all in the teaching game and so look at similar things. The power of networking means we’ve been able to help each other, just a bit, without really even trying.