SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

This May Be Delicious.....But I Already Know How to Bookmark

My first experience with bookmarking was using a paper bookmark in a real book to mark special pages. I really thought I was an advanced computer user when I learned how to use a web browser to create a digital bookmark of a website to store all of my favorite URL's. Then along came Delicious....

REFLECTIONS ON LEARNING

I really had no idea what this unit was all about prior to starting to work on it. I was a real beginner. I had not even heard the phrase "social bookmarking"before starting this week's work. I had used bookmarking in web browsers for years but never any social bookmarking sites. The old bookmark feature have resulted in frustration to the point where I really have not even used them for quite some time now. Some of the issues that I found with them included:

• I have tried several different browsers and currently run three different ones. They each have their own favorites folder and there is no automatic way (that I know about) to link the favorites between them. As a result I would have to search through the favorites of the different browsers to find my bookmarks. It became easier to just find sites using Google.
• The list of bookmarks that I have created over the years has become quite large and unorganized making it hard to navigate and locate things I am looking for.
• As the list ages there are bookmarks that are linked to sites that no longer exist or have changed URL.
• I have had all of my favorites lost when my computer was attacked by a virus and the hard drive had to be completely redone. It was frustrating to have to start collecting my favorite sites all over from scratch.
• My old bookmarks were static and only available on the machine that they were created on.
• I think that I finally quit using this because of all of these issues and the fact that this bookmarking was very limited in its usefulness. It could only perform the very simple task of relocating sites I had marked. Often this could be accomplished easier with a google search.

I have found in my journey this week that all of these issues have been overcome with the use of social bookmarking sites.

The first part of my learning about social bookmarking began by reading chapter 6 from Will Richardson's (2009) book and checking out the trailfire that Dr. DeGroot (2010) had created for us. These resources were a good introduction and really got me interested in looking at delicious in particular.

Last week I signed up for a delicious account. My username is edvarjassy. I have not been able to find anyone that I know on delicious yet so if any of you want to join me in a network I would like to try that out. I tried to include my network badge but could not get that to work. I think the fact that you can share bookmarks over the web is extremely powerful.

I liked the fact that I was able to upload my current favorites to the delicious site and it tagged them for me based on the folder structure that existed. There is a lot of work to add additional tags to make it more meaningful but based on that I now have a tag cloud in delicious. I found that I could add a tag roll to a blog by pasting the html code delicious provided me. I tried this several times and can not get it to work so I will move on and conclude that I did not learn how to use this aspect of delicious.

I love the idea of now being able to search for tags that you create. This provides a great deal more flexibility than the traditional bookmarking. Richardson (2009) talks about "folksonomies" that are created in social bookmarking sites. The fact that we are not completely relying on machines and technology to create the tags allows us to have a greater value in the way we organize and search for web pages.

Some of the features of Delicious that I found interesting and will be useful are:

• The ability to tag and search your bookmarks for those tags.
• The ability to search other peoples tags for related web pages
• The ability to create networks of people to share tags with
• Being able to subscribe to other users and to specific tags
• The ability to add a simple button to your browser toolbar to allow you to easily add pages to delicious from any browser you use.
• The fact that it is web based.

DesRoches (2008) from the Saskatchewan School Library Asociation said, "Social bookmarking is one of those tools that I use everyday and without it could not do my job." and "My social bookmarking tool of choice is Delicious." I found it interesting that she would choose such a strong statement in support of Delicious. I have not used it long enough to decide if I would be in agreement with this but with my initial look think it will be a valuable tool.

Upon further research and reading I came across an interesting blog. Gonzalez (2007) wrote a brief account of five tools that could be used to mark up the web in his Techcrunch blog. I was quite intrigued by his glowing review of Diigo and Trailfire. This lead me to do some further exploration of Diigo.

This YouTube video does a great job of explaining the main features of Diigo.

Diigo V4: Research ~ annotate, archive, organize from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

After learning a bit more about Diigo I signed up for a Diigo account as well. From my readings I thought that it would not be very useful and it seemed that most of the people I had read talking about social bookmarking had a strong preference for delicious. I was quite pleasantly surprised with what I found.

Diigo was easy to use and not only did it provide a means of social bookmarking but it allowed you to mark up webpages as well. Features such as highlighting and sticky notes added another dimension to the bookmarking of pages. These features allow you to highlight certain aspect of the page so you can find the important information quickly when you return to the page. This would be very valuable when doing research or when you are sharing information with a class and you want to explain something or highlight it for students. The other aspect of Diigo that is a bit different that delicious is that it will archive the webpage so that if the original is taken down you are still able to access the copy that you have saved.

PERSONAL LEARNINGS

Learning about social bookmarking will have an impact on the way that I use the web in the future. I have added the Delicious and the Diigo tools to my browsers. I will use these in the future for doing all of my bookmarking. The nice thing with this site is that I don't need to keep a set of bookmarks for work and a set for personal use.

It will solve all of the issues I listed at the start of my blog. I will not have to worry about which browser I am using as they all have the delicious and diigo buttons installed on their toolbar. A large list of sites is now what I will strive for and not have to worry about organizing it. Diigo will help with the issue of sites that no longer exist. At least it will maintain a copy for me. If I switch computers or loose my data, my bookmarks will not be effected. I won't have to worry about which computer I am on to access my bookmarks.

I look forward to developing my tagging skills and building on the bookmarks I have. I also look forward to using delicious to communicate with others. I think that this will be the tool that I use more for personal work and Diigo is a tool that I will migrate more to for work.

TEACHING AND LEARNING

The use of social bookmarking in education has some real potential. I really feel that Diigo has a lot more potential for use in my situation. I can see myself using it to mark up and share websites with my catalyst teachers. It is also something that can be quite useful in sharing ideas and professional development sites with teachers. I lead our curriculum renewal in our school division and see this as a tool that will allow teachers from across the division to share information.

I see some potential for its use in the classroom but I have a feeling that it will be slower to catch on with regular teachers. They could use it in a variety of ways to share information with students and also as a tool for connecting student's ideas. The reason I feel that it will be slower to catch on is that it seems to be a bit more technical in nature. It is easy to use but would take some work with teachers to get them to use it. Also I think that there are some technical issues within our school computer systems. We would have to convince our IT department to install this on all computers and that has been a difficult thing to accomplish a lately. I also think that there would be a lot of questions about copyright, and student privacy rights. The fact that this is open to the world is a major stumbling block that our division is having a hard time getting past.

When I asked our e-learning catalyst teachers about the extent of the use of any of these sites they informed me that it is not being used at all in our schools. In fact any time that they have been asked about it (seldom) they have recommended the use of Google bookmark for this very reason. At least within Google bookmark there is some level of privacy not found with delicious or Diigo.

CONCLUSION

Bookmarking has made tremendous strides with the development of these social bookmarking sites. There are many advantages to using these sites but I have not seen it applied in our schools yet. It is slow to catch on and I feel that it will take a while before teachers, students and parents are accepting of it as the valuable tool that has been reveal during my learnings over the past week.

References:

De Groot, J. (2010). Trailfire: Social bookmarking http://trailfire.com/joannedegroot/trailview/57365.

DesRoches, D. (2008,October). Collection development using social bookmarking. The Medium,J1-J3. Retrieved February 10, 2010, from CBCA Education. (Document ID:1618352121).

Gonzalez, N. (2007, April, 10). Five ways to mark up the web. http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/10/5-ways-to-mark-up-the-web.

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. 2^nded. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.