Educational Uses of Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking can be used in an educational setting in many different ways. Students can create groups and share research findings. Students can also create personal accounts and save research. Others can follow this research too. There is also the capability on many social bookmarking sites to research who is researching what you research! These sites can be used in so many different ways to aid an established research community and to create community among learners. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xYm75gtq1k

A disadvantage for social bookmarking is that there are no defined standards for tags.  For instance in searching the tag “social bookmarking”, one individual might call something social bookmarking that another individual might not. This lack of standardization of the tag words might cause one researcher to have to weed through irrelevant material to find what they are looking for. 

Magnolia, diigo, delicious and Furl are identified on this sate as the most used sites for social bookmarking.

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

This video overviewed features of Delicious. One thing I learned from this site is that when something is tagged, it must be tagged with one word. For instance, 5thgrade not 5^th Grade. Also when a site is tagged you can look at the other people who have tagged the site as well and further investigate what else those people tagged. Also you can subscribe to any persons’ tags and can be updated when they update and add more sites to this tag as well.

http://frequanq.blogspot.com/2005/02/social-bookmarking-in-education.html

This site overviews the impact of social bookmarking. The real heart of these services is identified as tagging. Tagging is creating a keyword of keywords to describe a collection of archived web pages. FURL and del.icio.us are the two most popular social bookmarking services. FURL saves a private copy of the page so even if the page changes or is deleted, the user has a copy. Del.icio.us has a feature that suggests tags. There are also other types of social bookmarking sites. Flickr is a photo service with annotation features. Then there are academic sites like CiteULike and Connotea.  All of these social bookmarking sites can be used by groups of people that might be working on a research project as a team. Or even an individual can save these links for their own personal research which can be view and saved by others which can help; them with their research too.

http://www.citeulike.org/

An account can be created on this site, which can help the user manage and discover scholarly references. Not too much information was available on this site without signing up for an account.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RvAkTuL02A

This video overviews that features and usages of the website Diigo. Diigo allows users to bookmark sites to a created account. This account can be opened and viewed on any computer, not just the one the bookmark was saved to. Text can be highlighted and “sticky notes” can be added to the saved sites also. Diigo is a social bookmarking site that can also be used for chat, which would create a problem and would likely not be used in K-12 classrooms.