BP7_2009112_social_bookmarking

Week 2 - Activity - Social Bookmarking

Assignment Instructions:

Research educational uses for social bookmarking. Research the practice of social bookmarking and describe the ways in which it can be a benefit to learners and/or educators. Summarize your findings in your post.

Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com

Social bookmarking is a system that allows online access to personal web page bookmarks through an internet portal, and offers the opportunity to share personal bookmarks and to view the bookmarks of others. By using a system of "tags" or important descriptive keywords, an individualized organization and classification system can be applied to websites that you have marked for later reference.

According to the Social Bookmarking entry of Wikipedia:

Delicious (originally called del.icio.us) pioneered tagging and coined the term social bookmarking when it was founded in 2003. Other bookmarking, keyword tagging, shared favorites services (sometimes called social citation services) and recommendation systems like Stumbleupon have been developed since. There are similar systems for sharing social news and recommending articles provided by sites such as Digg, reddit, and Newsvine. (Wikipedia)

According to 3spots, there are over 200 social bookmarking services.
What's so great about SOCIAL bookmarks is that it creates a people powered search engine. So even if you don't use these services to bookmark you can use these for searching. As the more a web page is bookmarked, the more popular, the best links you'll find! (3spots)

Some educational uses of social bookmarking described in the web2tutorial about Social Bookmarks include teacher/student and teacher/teacher connections at the classroom, grade, academic department, school, and global levels. (web2tutorial)

• Network with other educators around the globe who share your interests.
• Create social bookmark accounts for your school's academic departments. Teachers within the department all contribute to the growing database of web resources.
• Allow yourself and your students to share bookmarks on research topics.
• Collaborate on projects with other schools, sharing bookmarks between all participating communities.

Establishing and enforcing a class list of standard tags - including a class or project-specific tag - is helpful whenever students are working on a collaborative project. 

Disadvantages of the social bookmarking system parallel the advantages of any user-generated shared content. Because there are no standards for tagging, individuals create their own tags, which may be different to what someone else would come up with for the same website. Tags may be misspelled, inaccurate, or inappropriate, making the categorizing information much less useful.

References:

3spots. (2007, April 16). ALL Social that CAN bookmark. Retrieved from http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/01/all-social-that-can-bookmark.html


Discovery Education. (2000). Bookmark. [Clip art]. Copyright © 2000 Discovery.com, Inc. Originally published by Discovery.com, Inc. Clip art images Copyright © 1998 Mark A. Hicks. Originally published by Mark A. Hicks. Retrieved from http://school.discoveryeducation.com/clipart/copyright.html

web2tutorial. Social Bookmarks. Retrieved from http://web2tutorial.wikispaces.com/social_bookmarks

Wikipedia. Social bookmarking. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking