D/B3

Wow, social bookmarking is awesome. If only I had known about this before! I taught art at three schools last year and would copy and paste cool websites and send them to myself over e-mail so could remember them at my other schools. Once I got to my other schools I would add them to my favorites. What a waste of time since I could've been using delicious. It has been fun trying the various new technologies for this class, but social bookmarking is my favorite at this point.
I think social bookmarking has so many possibilities for use in schools. At one school that I was working in two years ago, I noticed that the computer lab had a list of cool sites to visit based on subject area. I think it would be great to list all of those on delicious and tag them based on subject. In doing this, students could access these sites from home, as could parents. The only drawback would be making sure the students didn't add sites, or at least, someone would need to check if they are appropriate, labeled correctly, etc. Teachers could also share cool sites with each other this way. At every art meeting that I attend someone brings up a good site for us to "write down." And every time it needs to be repeated various times, and still someone will e-mail saying they copied it down wrong. I can't wait to share this bookmarking site with my colleagues.
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In regards to the Trends and Issues text and their definitions of Educational Technology/Instructional Technology and/or Instructional Design and Technology I think they have way over thought the matter. Obviously the ideas behind Educational Technology change because technology is constantly changing, emerging and becoming obsolete. All of the definitions seemed fine to me. Maybe I'm just not as picky, but as long as the definition refers to using technology as a way to teach and learn, that is fine with me. As technology advances, society will have to continually deal with different problems related to the advancing technology. When I was in high school, very few people had cell phones, now kids as young as 5 have cell phones which brings about a lot of new concerns involving texting while driving, pictures being taken in class, cheating with phones, etc. And these are only a few problems! We would have to rewrite the definition of educational technology every time a new product came out or a old product had a new feature. I think we need to be more flexible in our definitions of educational technology because as soon as one definition is published it is already starting to get outdated.