Social Bookmarking in Education?
This week we continue to study web tools and applications that can contribute to education. As part of this week’s assignment we were to research social bookmarking and to evaluate two of these sites.
Working with social bookmarking was a totally new experience for me. I had never heard of nor worked with any social bookmarking sites. To become familiar and lay a foundation for this assignment I Googled bookmarking and found http://www.slideshare.net/zvezdan/social-bookmarking-in-education . It was quite informative and helpful. I am quite impressed with the ability to bookmark or post a list of sites (URLs) on the web all in one location that I will have access to from anywhere on the web. The ability to tag the bookmarks relative to my background is quite practical, especially when researching a topic and utilizing postings from other contributors. At first, I thought “social bookmarking” was just that, “social” bookmarking used for strictly social purposes similar to e harmony.com. After researching and experimenting with a few social bookmarking sites, I became familiar with the usefulness and possible educational application of the tool. For educational reasons, I prefer to call this application “Collaborative Bookmarking”.
The two sites I evaluated were www.delicious.com and www.edutagger.com . Most of my searches in both were dealing with music instruction. I created an account in www.edutagger.com and began to navigate the site. I found the site quite limited after several searches. This may be due to a relatively small number or contributors in the music area. The bookmarks that I did find did not present the type of information relevant to what I would utilize as a professional educator. Tags and contributors were not easily found nor presented in a useful format. These results of this study may be contributed to my lack of experience on the site or relative unfamiliarity to this application.
I found www.delicious.com to be quite the opposite though. It is the largest, most widely utilized, social bookmarking site. It does present a great deal of information (most popular searches) that could be distracting at times for the educator and/or student. All that aside, I found the site to be quite useful. Its large number of contributors/collaborators is an asset as the result of its immense number of bookmarks. I found that after the initial search the results were easy to read while presenting a great deal of information. Tags are easy to find from others’ postings. The presentation of the tags (folksonomies) contributes and eases the task of determining relevancy to your research topic. You can click on the contributors name to view his/her book page and his/her bookmarks. This is especially useful when you find your interests are the same as the delicious contributor. It also saves a lot of time digging. You can see other relative sites and URLs to your interests and progressively research them. The “stored # of times” number indicator giving the quantity of saves for the URL source is quite helpful in identifying the most utilized/most popular sites. This permits you to determine how much the site is utilized by others-a possible indicator for reliability. Tags are also presented and can be clicked on to link to other related sites. The bookmark originator is identified and can be clicked on to view who first identified and saved the site in delicious for shared reference.
This site would be an asset to any teacher or student conducting research or seeking information concerning tags/indicators relative to a subject. The social aspect permits you to “dig” back several generations of contributors. I found the ability to possibly research the contributors to be quite helpful in determining the reliability of the source. My evaluation of this site was formulated though trial and error. I did sometimes get lost on the site after going through several generations of links. My expertise though will improve with practice and with face to face help from other users. The site will help replace the old “library (electronic) searches” of yesteryear. The site empowers both the student and teacher to search, retrieve, and collaboratively share efforts of educational research.
The use of Social Bookmarking sites will not cure all the ills of today’s education system, but these sites are necessary as part of a cache of technological tools greatly contributing to the educational success of the individual student, classes, schools, districts, and nation striving to improve itself.
Hope you had a happier Thanksgiving than our turkey ☺
My family is doing well. My students continue to learn. My dogs still loves to bite me. Life is good!
Until next week, jkluball
December 4, 2009 at 3:37 am |
Very nice Jeff. I wonder if you can think of new ways to use Social bookmarking tools to organize and categorize music, musicians, or programs?