What is social bookmarking?

After watching Lee LeFever’s Social Bookmarking in Plain English video, I learned that I have been managing my favorite web sites “the old way,” using my browser tab. From personal experience, I already knew that bookmaking becomes messy over time and that one’s bookmarks are tied to one computer… but when you regularly work on more than one machine, your disorganized life online is only compounded.

Social bookmarking has evolved from the need for users to be more organized in terms of managing their favorite web sites… but it has really become so much more. On TeacherTube, Lori Burch also refers to social bookmarking as “collaborative” or “shared” bookmarking. Popular online bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, Furl, Diigo, Stumbleupon and ma.gnolia, allow users to organize and store all their bookmarks in one place on the Internet, rather than on their computers. As a result, your favorite bookmarks are accessible from any computer, wherever you are… but perhaps the greatest advantage to using social bookmarking, is the potential to share your bookmarks with other users who have similar interests to your own.

The social implications of sharing your favorites with others through sites like del.icio.us allow you to build “your own community of researchers that gather relevant information for you” (Richardson, p.89). In return, because your bookmarks are public (unless you specify otherwise), your bookmarks can be shared with others. This reciprocity makes social bookmarking truly unique in creating a network of users that supply and borrow content from the community as a whole. Everyone who participates in this “pay-it-forward” kind of online society benefits.

Tags are the key to making strong connections with other users. Every user has the authority to assign their own “tags” to their bookmarks, to organize and categorize their favorite web sites. Users can add as many tags as they like to each bookmark and they can also see how many others have used the same tags. Tagging can actually provide validation to a site that has been bookmarked repeatedly by users as one worth looking at. Eventually, a group of users can use particular tags as keywords to locate specific content… this type of tagging creates what is know as folksonomies. Adding other users to your network allows you to collaborate in another way because you can view and add the tags of colleagues.

Concerns

As with most Web 2.0 tools and services, there are still some concerns about using social bookmarking in our schools, as is evident in the “access denied” dialogue box that pops up on divisional computers. Foremost, is that tagging bookmarks remains a very inexact science. There is no limit as to what you can tag, so you never know where a connection might lead a user, especially if that user is a student. Even the bookmarks labelled as “popular” can be cause for concern because you can’t predict what might come up.

Student access might also tempt some users to add inappropriate web sites as bookmarks and subsequently be able to share them with others in the class and beyond. Social bookmarking could also be misused by those users who deliberately and repeatedly target a web site they wish to promote with popular tags, so that it receives a high ranking and therefore more online exposure.

Implications for teaching and learning

Even though I have only been registered with del.icio.us for less than a week, I am quickly coming to the conclusion that social bookmarking has huge potential for supporting student learning and facilitating professional collaboration among educators. Social bookmarking is perhaps most useful for sharing a collection of resources with a group (7 things you should know about social bookmarking). As the “how-to article” on social bookmarking stated on the Teaching today site, “sharing is what makes social bookmarking so powerful.” In considering that students do not have access to social bookmarking services in our schools (even though they may at home), it is perhaps teachers who can really use this service to the greatest advantage.

Since social bookmarking sites allow users to link to others, it becomes easier to find the best educational sites for classroom use because you can also view what others have found to be useful. This is handy for several reasons… you might otherwise miss quality sites that just aren’t that popular and you might also find a kindred spirit who has similar interests and needs in information collection. As well, teachers collaborating on a project can share bookmarks by grouping them together in a bundle. In our division, we are presently in the process of setting up professional learning networks with teaching staff, and I could easily see social bookmarking becoming a powerful piece in the structure that is established.

Even though our students are still bookmarking their favorites on the computers they use at school, they can still access their bookmarks on different computers because their files are on the divisional network, rather than on a particular computer. This still doesn’t solve the organizational issue of favorites lists from becoming overwhelming and it certainly doesn’t allow students to share their favorite sites with their classmates as easily as it might. I could see that a site like del.icio.us could very useful to students working on group projects, both at school and at home. Since a bookmarking service is able to store a user’s bookmarks safely and securely online, there is also far less opportunity for students to “misplace” the sites they need. This is also great for completing research assignments because “all of your relevant online materials [are found] in one place” (DesRoches, D., 2007). It makes research more collaborative and encourages students to be more critical in bookmarking resources that others will see and maybe use.

In my current assignment, I could envision using del.icio.us to share bookmarks that I think members of our library staff might find valuable. I could network collections of bookmarks with different groups and select the content for teacher-librarians, library technicians and assistant librarians. Members from each group could contribute their own bookmarks, creating a kind of custom database. As Will Richardson explains in his article Taming the Beast: social bookmarking, school divisions (or in my case school library staff), could “decide on a unique tag that everyone can use when they bookmark something of interest.” This allows for a particular group to collaboratively build a specialized online resource for their personal use.

Another part of my job includes providing direct support to schools operating without a teacher-librarian on staff… which means that I’m frequently on the road and it is not unusual for me to be in three or four schools in one day. Being able to access my bookmarks, no matter what computer I use and no matter which school I’m in, would certainly make life easier. As Donna DesRoches states in her article All together now: social bookmarking offers a new way to store and share Web sites, “librarians and teachers can tailor bookmarks to meet a classroom’s curricular and research needs.” Even though I am unable to use my del.icio.us account to do this at work, I should eventually be able to doing something similar in the “my site” area of our divisional portal.

I can see that I probably should have been tapping into the benefits of social bookmarking much sooner. Even though, del.icio.us is restoring some order to my former bookmarking system, I can see that when I registered for the service, I seem to have imported older bookmarks from my former browser into my new account… so I will have a little housecleaning to do in order to streamline my new Web 2.0 environment. So even if I haven’t got everything working perfectly yet, I am hopeful and I can see that for my personal use, the advantages to using social bookmarking far outweigh the negatives.
-katkin