BP5_2009112_Social Bookmarking

(Photo: Freedigitalphotos.net)

Educational Uses for Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking has a great place in the education world.  As many teachers are obsessed with organization, this tool can only help.  The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of it List, the features of which included public and private bookmarks (Goulder, 2006).  Within the next three years, online bookmark services became competitive, with venture-backed companies such as Back flip, Blink, Clip2, Click Marks, Hotlinks, and others entering the market (Goulder, 2006). 

So why would social bookmarking be useful in the education world? For example, I'm always highly motivated, by Will Richardson.  After all, he's doing some remarkable thinking around the innovative ways that technology can be used in the classroom.  Wouldn't it be cool to share his online reading list? Well, you can! It’s available on Delicious, one of the web's most popular social bookmarking applications.   Now here's the cool thing:  For each item that you bookmark, social bookmarking applications like Delicious will provide you with a direct link to all of the other users who bookmarked that the same item.  You can then see that many other people saved this website as a valuable site.  You can also check out what those people have been saving and see if there are any other common interests. 

While researching social bookmarking, I found these great uses on the wiki classroom website (Tangient LLC, 2009) :

·      Network with other educators around the globe who share your interests.

·      Create social bookmark accounts for your school's academic departments. Teachers within the department all contribute to the growing database of web resources.

·      Contact other people for professional networking, based on their social bookmarks.

·      Allow yourself and your students to share bookmarks on research topics.

·      Subscribe to someone's bookmarks via RSS and receive updates whenever they add new websites.

·      Collaborate on projects with other schools, sharing bookmarks between all participating communities (Tangient LLC, 2009)

 Will I begin to use it in the classroom?  I think that I will use it as an educator.  It will be an easy way to sort through the websites I use on a regular basis.  It will also be nice to see how many other people are using the same websites as I am.  I am also looking forward to finding new websites through other people.  Teaching kindergarten limits some of the technology I can use in my classroom.  I have found many uses for most of the technology we have learned thus far.  The social bookmarking might be a little tough for the kids.  If I were teaching another grade, I would definitely utilize this in the classroom.  

References

Goulder, Scott. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Retrived

from  Journal of Information Science 32 (2): 198-208.

 

Leelefever. (2007, August 7).  Social bookmarking in plain English.  Video posted to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU

 

Tangient LLC. (2009, November 3). Classroom2dot0 – social bookmarking. 

Retrieved from http://wiki.classroom20.com/Social+Bookmarking