User Spotlight: Howard Rheingold

Because Delicious has such an incredibly diverse and vibrant community, we’ve decided to spotlight specific users who are curating content in interesting and imaginative ways.

Members of the education community are some of the most passionate and active users Delicious. For teachers, students, and even whole classes, Delicious can be a powerful tool to stay informed and organized in a field, and to easily pass information along to students, colleagues, and the world at large. Howard Rheingold knows this better than anyone.

Howard Rheingold is an author and educator who has taught digital journalism at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and his own online university Rheingold U, and was one of the original users of Delicious from way back in 2004 when the site was still in beta.

Howard uses Delicious to gather information, concepts, and theories to share with his students. For example, he uses the tag Smartmobs (the name of his 2002 book about the potential of technology to crowdsource global change) to catalog examples of this in today’s world — a resource which is remarkably useful for anyone trying to leverage the web to generate change or to spark a movement.

Howard is also a big advocate for the social advantages of Delicious. One of his top techniques is to use systematic searches and tag filtering to easily dig deep into a topic and share that information with his students. Sharing links with his journalism class on the topic of Twitter becomes as simple as combining two of his tags (“Comm217″ + “Twitter”) and sending them the link.

Another one of his tips is to try to discover experts to follow on Delicious: “Look for popular sites [with] particular tags of interest, find out who the earliest people were to tag those sites, [and then] look at what else they’ve bookmarked.”

Check out all of Howard Rheingold’s links here:
http://delicious.com/hrheingold/