Bookmarking, Social Bookmarking
What is it?
Bookmarking or, more commonly, social bookmarking, tools extend the “bookmarking” or “favourites” features of your Web browser in three important ways:
- They enable you to access your bookmarked links from any computer, not just the one on which you were working when you added the bookmark.
- They allow you to share your bookmarks with anyone else who uses the same tool. However, you can choose to keep some or all of your links private.
- You can categorise your links through the use of tags: classifications that you can devise to help you retrieve links on related topics. If other people have used the same tag as you, then you can choose to see the URLs that they have associated with that tag.
The Educause Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) 7 Things You Should Know About... series contains a useful guide to social bookmarking (PDF) and Common Craft has created a light-hearted animated introduction to Social Bookmarking (audio required).
How can I use it with my students?
Creating bookmarks can be a useful activity in itself for practising research skills. Franklin and van Harmelen (2007) suggest the following uses:
- Teachers and students together can build up collections of resources, and "with a little ingenuity" include non-Web based materials too.
- Teachers and students can create and share reading lists, using tags to structure them in categories.
- In a group project, team members can collate and share resources. Team members can either have a common account or, if they have individual accounts, use a common tagging protocol to identify the relevant resources.
- Social bookmarking services can also provide alternatives to search engines, as the sites will have been deemed worthy of being bookmarked by someone else who shares the same interest and has tagged them accordingly.
Examples
We are still researching examples and case studies for this topic. If you would like to contribute any (whether from your own teaching or from other sources), please contact us.
Where can I find a service?
Social bookmarking services tend to be free to use. Three of the most popular are:
- del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us
- Furl at http://www.furl.net
- BibSonomy at http://www.bibsonomy.org
You can find a more comprehensive list of social bookmarking tools on the Website of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies.
