Week 2: Social Bookmarking and Learning

[Tony Karrer]

I'll be curious what people think about this.

I've used social bookmarking primarily as a tool to track my bookmarks (and I more aggressively bookmark because of having tags). I use it also as a work tool to share bookmarks in work groups. And, in smalls ways in formal learning to have people share bookmarks. The example here with this course of the quality of the bookmarks that have been shared is about as good as I've seen, and I appreciate the content related to blogging.

While all of this is part of learning, I really don't think of social bookmarking tools quite the same way (as it relates to learning) as I do around some of the other technologies we will discuss. There's not conversation in the same way. It's a very small part of the larger learning. It's more a shared memory bank. But maybe I'm missing something.

Are you seeing this as a more important learning tool than I am?

Do you use it in a classroom or formal learning setting in some interesting way?

[Lore Reß]

I made the experience, that Social Bookmarking is a very easy way to engage people who did not had "contact" to collaborative online learning and working. I use it in seminars an workshops to share my ressources with the participants and sometimes there are tasks to be completed using Social Bookmarking.

[Michele Martin]

Tony, I agree that as a learning tool, social bookmarking is not nearly as robust as something like blogs or Ning. However, one way I think it could be used more effectively for learning is as an online portfolio. I'm thinking about this in the larger sense of learning and professional development, not necessarily for a particular course, although I also think that it could be used for a course as well.

I've been experimenting with that idea for a little while, setting up a tag for myself and then bookmarking and annotating my blog posts, communities I'm running, etc. My portfolio is here.

In my case, so much of what I do is online, this makes huge sense as one of the quickest and easiest ways for me to "document" my skills and accomplishments. I could see using this in a course setting as well, particularly one where learners might be using multiple online formats for their work. Delicious could more easily and quickly pull everything into one place.

There are other options as well (putting it all in a blog or on a wiki), but this has for me been the portfolio I most reliably add to since it's much easier for me to just tag it in Delicious. If I wanted, I could also use it as the repository I then go to to put together a more complete portfolio.

[Harold Jarche]

I think that social bookmarking is an easy initial step in exploring networked learning. It's one step beyond being a Lurker and doesn't require the effort of SNS, blogs or wikis. There is much that can be learned in how people us bookmarks.

[Vineetha]

Although on first thought, it does seem like social bookmarks are more of a library than a teaching/learning tool, I think we can use them more formally in a learning environment. For example, social bookmarks can be very useful as a way to share resources in a class. Instead of manually adding links to a blog or a Wiki or even pasting them on to a PowerPoint slide, this is a simpler and faster way to share online resources. Another way to use this would be as a part of a project. All the students in a group could search for relevant material online and tag them with a pre-defined code. It would make it much easier to pull out all the content when needed from a central location. Also, the training facilitator could validate the resources used in a project by looking at the relevant delicious or diigo page. It would make it easier for geographically dispersed study groups to work together especially in online courses. You could also use the tool to create assignments for the learners. You could group some links related to a topic and ask students to create a blog post with their thoughts on it or throw open a discussion forum based on the links.

[paul lowe]

one obvious way to me is to use it as a way to asses the level of judgement and analysis that learners have over internet sources, they could be asked to bookmark a series of sites, write reviews of them in the info box in diigo or delicious, and then rate them according to a rubric of values eg trustworthyness, depth of site, links to other useful sites etc etc
in this way social book marking could become an assessed exercise with a real world value of building a resource for a community of practice online...

[Paulo Simões]

Inspired in Michele Martin portfolio I've tried to create a home page using delicious with the english translated title "who I am". I think it works very well having all presencemy, on the web, all in one place.

I´ve already tried to do working groups in a single course using social bookmarking and the students like it...but I agree with Michele I think it works great as a portfolio.

[Lesley Ann Wallace]

I see the potential of social bookmarking in student generated research (in terms of lit reviews). If let's say three of us are needing to identify purpose for a research topic and then search out what is already out there available to read, together in social bookmarking we have a tool to collect our resources and references. Eventually, we can decide how to break those up, discuss certain ones, or use them in any other capacity.

[Lesley Ann Wallace]

Good point about how bookmarks give insight into people (students)

Harold Jarche said:

I think that social bookmarking is an easy initial step in exploring networked learning. It's one step beyond being a Lurker and doesn't require the effort of SNS, blogs or wikis. There is much that can be learned in how people us bookmarks.

[Lee Kraus]

I agree with Harold and Leslie, and with Paul. In a networked learning environment social bookmarking is a great way to collaborate. I actually think there are some real interesting ideas behind the act of social bookmarking and how it might relate to metacognition. I wrote a post on my blog in June of 2007. I also have played around with an elearning application that allows learners to associate bookmarks with learning goals, but it wasn't real successful and I think it was primarily the "lack of conversation" as Tony points out in his post, around the resources (bookmarks). However, I believe that as tools continue to improve to allow the content of the bookmark to be more easily viewed (like RSS, YouTube, wiki embeds) we will see social bookmarking play a key role in creating "learner-focused" training modules. It may not be delicious or these first generation tools that support it, but new tools will come and it will be very important.

To your last question, I encourage social bookmarking whenever I can by showing it's obvious utility for accessing your bookmarks from anywhere.

Finally, a note... this is my first post to this community and I am not sure of etiquette and I only shared a link back to my blog because I thought it was really relevant. I hope that is acceptable.

Lee

[Harold Jarche]

Your etiquette is just fine, Lee, and thanks for the relevant link.

Lee Kraus said:

I agree with Harold and Leslie, and with Paul. In a networked learning environment social bookmarking is a great way to collaborate. I actually think there are some real interesting ideas behind the act of social bookmarking and how it might relate to metacognition. I wrote a post on my blog in June of 2007. I also have played around with an elearning application that allows learners to associate bookmarks with learning goals, but it wasn't real successful and I think it was primarily the "lack of conversation" as Tony points out in his post, around the resources (bookmarks). However, I believe that as tools continue to improve to allow the content of the bookmark to be more easily viewed (like RSS, YouTube, wiki embeds) we will see social bookmarking play a key role in creating "learner-focused" training modules. It may not be delicious or these first generation tools that support it, but new tools will come and it will be very important.

To your last question, I encourage social bookmarking whenever I can by showing it's obvious utility for accessing your bookmarks from anywhere.

Finally, a note... this is my first post to this community and I am not sure of etiquette and I only shared a link back to my blog because I thought it was really relevant. I hope that is acceptable.

Lee

[Lee Kraus]

Thanks ;)

Harold Jarche said:

Your etiquette is just fine, Lee, and thanks for the relevant link.

Lee Kraus said:

I agree with Harold and Leslie, and with Paul. In a networked learning environment social bookmarking is a great way to collaborate. I actually think there are some real interesting ideas behind the act of social bookmarking and how it might relate to metacognition. I wrote a post on my blog in June of 2007. I also have played around with an elearning application that allows learners to associate bookmarks with learning goals, but it wasn't real successful and I think it was primarily the "lack of conversation" as Tony points out in his post, around the resources (bookmarks). However, I believe that as tools continue to improve to allow the content of the bookmark to be more easily viewed (like RSS, YouTube, wiki embeds) we will see social bookmarking play a key role in creating "learner-focused" training modules. It may not be delicious or these first generation tools that support it, but new tools will come and it will be very important.

To your last question, I encourage social bookmarking whenever I can by showing it's obvious utility for accessing your bookmarks from anywhere.

Finally, a note... this is my first post to this community and I am not sure of etiquette and I only shared a link back to my blog because I thought it was really relevant. I hope that is acceptable.

Lee