BP5_2009121_SocialBookmarking

[Web 2.0 Diagram].

http://delicious.com/joan_lourenco

Social bookmarking is a way of making the Web work for you or as Wikipedia defines it, it is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources (Social Bookmarking, 2009).

Comments posted on the teacherlibrarianwiki stated that it is used “to share bookmarks with teachers when working on collaborative units. Students can go back to bookmarks they have made at home or at school” (Social Bookmarking, 2007).

Using social bookmarks can improve search engine page rankings by saving and categorizing resources/Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Why is this significant? According to the 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking podcast located on Educause, social bookmarking provides framework, pushes out specific resources, helps users find relevant resources, actively engages learners and gives them a sense of ownership, and is easier to update and share. Additionally, social networking can move students from passive learners to active readers engaged in discussion. Through social bookmarking, the information on a particular topic continues to grow and is available to the global community. Providing the users select relevant information, the value of the bookmarks will increase (Bayne, 2008).

I noticed that de.licio.us was listed second on the Top 100 Tools for Learning list. One of the comments posted by a user of the de.licio.us bookmarking tool, mentioned this was “Information I can use for presentations, lectures, blogposts and papers. My student’s are used of finding a link to a specific Delicious tag in their ‘required reading’ list. I teach my students to search in Delicious as an alternative to Google” (Top 100 Tools, 2009).

As a teacher librarian, I can automatically see the benefits as I prepare collaborative units. I will share my delicious account with my teachers. Currently I send a resource a week out to the teachers and while they love the information resources, I am often asked, do you remember the site you sent on [e.g.,100 ways to do a book report, a webquest, or the project on cultural studies, etc. ] and I will try to remember which computer I used to send it, my home one or work and where I have it bookmarked. Now I can use delicious and create tags by subject area, enabling me to locate the resource much more efficiently.

References

Bayne, G. (2008, September 16). 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking. [With Debra Everhart, Eric Kunnen, and Kaye Shelton]. Podcast retrieved November 29, 2009, from http://www.educause.edu/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutSocia/156804

Web 2.0 Diagram. (2009). [Image]. Retrieved on December 2, 2009, from http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml? searchterm=social&anyorall=all

Social Bookmarking. (2007). teacherlibrarianwiki. Retrieved November 29, 2009, from http://teacherlibrarianwiki.pbworks.com/Social%20Bookmarking

Social bookmarking. (2009). Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved November 29, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009. (2009, November 15). Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. Retrieved November 29, 2009, from http://c4lpt.co.uk/recommended/index.html