Social Bookmarking

Share the wealth with social bookmarking!

Yet another new web 2.0 tool. I've never used any webbased bookmarking tool other than "My Favourites" on Internet Explorer. I have to admit, that it's not easy to find anything I've bookmarked in "My Favourites" because there are so many folders, subfolers, etc. Whatever mood I'm in I might add it to that folder, yet when I look for it, I can't find it or when I finally do, I'd question myself as to why I placed it there in the first place.

Well, tools like Diigo, Del.icio.us, Citeulike, etc. allow someone like me with millions of bookmarks to tag each site, so I can search with keywords and it'll will find the ones that match the tags I have set. I picked Diigo to experiment with because Diigo offers highlighting the pages, adding sticky notes, creating groups, etc. What attracted me the most was the premium account option for educators to create student Diigo accounts, have all the same features as a regular account but there are privacy settings pre-set in the student Diigo accounts for just the teacher and classmates to communicate with each other, as well as limited "education-related" ads.

Signing up for an account was quick and easy. Importing my brower's bookmarks is another story. First I had to download the Diigo toolbar, (which is a bit redundant because the diioglet already offers the key functions), then I had to refind the page with instructions to export my bookmarks. Like I said, I have A LOT of bookmarks that I have collected over the last 5 years with this laptop. It's been four hours and I am still waiting for the email from Diigo to notify me that all my bookmarks have been loaded to Diigo. Diigo didn't suggest an approximate time as to when it would be done. They just said it depends on how many bookmarks I had and how many other users are also importing their bookmarks.

Nonetheless, I was not discouraged and started to play with the tools for random sites. The highlighting didn't seem to work with the URLs with pdfs. During my surfing, I immediately noticed the sticky notes posted by other people - though it can be annoying at times, much like the blue RSS feeds icon that pops up when I highlight certain things as well. I do like the ease of pressing "send" and all my annotations of a particular website would be sent directly to my blog.

Where's the wealth?

Ah yes, the wealth... that would be enriching others with your bookmarks and vice versa. So, you can share this with friends, students, colleagues, or strangers with similar interests and tags. More specifically, "social bookmarking sites, such as Delicious, Diigo, and CiteULike, can provide the resources to facilitate a scholarly approach to teaching where teachers concerned with developing research-based best practices can collectively assemble, annotate, recommend, and share scholarly resources, such as books, journal articles, websites, and contacts. Social
scholarly practices leverage and archive our collective intelligence. According to library media scholar Laura Cohen, social scholarship operates on principles such as 'openness, conversation, collaboration, access, sharing, and transparent revision.' As educators reflect on what it means
to take a scholarly approach to their teaching, their use of these social bibliography tools may, in turn, provide greater insight into their own attitudes and teaching practices (e.g., what it means to teach “the research paper” in the presence of social scholarship tools)."
(http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Publications/LL/LLIssues/Volume3620082009/JuneJulyNo8/36810g.pdf)

I absolutely agree with Laura Cohen's statement about how social scholarship works best when everyone works together and shares openly. At my previous school for the next school year, we will have designated blocks for teachers to participate in Professional Learning Community (PLC). These groups will be created by the teachers of all disciplines and what they will research is also up to the group. Many teachers commented on how it might be difficult to organize, share, discuss their individual research for their own group. Well, I think that social bookmarking is the solution to that concern and this also allows me to participate even though I'll be a few thousand miles away at another campus.

How reliable is social bookmarking?

1. Server

"In January, the popular social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia (ma.gnolia.com) suffered a major server failure that led to data corruption and loss. Suddenly, its users had no access to the content they'd bookmarked and no definitive answer from Ma.gnolia about when (or if) they'd get their data back. This event led many to consider the security Of their hosted web content. Sites hosting our web content have become so ubiquitous that most of us take their continued existence for granted. As we saw in the case of Ma.gnolia, this complacency can be a huge mistake." (Your Stuff, Their Rules. By: Farkas, Meredith. American Libraries, Jun/Jul2009, Vol. 40 Issue 6, p42-42, 1p)

Lesson learned? We should backup our important files in more than one place ie) one on your computer and one on the web - though this shouldn't prevent us from using these tools because what we gain is so much richer than what we lose and what we lose, we can probably find again and maybe more!

For more information about Ma.gnolia's sever failure:

Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.

2. Inaccurate tagging system (see annotated Diigo post on Disadvantages of Social Bookmarking)

Social Bookmarking in the Classroom and Library

This is definitely a great tool for teaching, practicing and evaluating the steps of good research in the classroom and the library. I also see it as a great way for students to share other sites they have found that might help other students in understanding concepts, since I can not read or write Chinese - I am not able to find relevants sites to aid at risk students' progress when a concept is too difficult to understand in a foreign language, yet it would be a stepping stone to know what the concept is first in their first language and then linking those ideas with the new English vocabulary.

Here's a sample of my Diigo Tags... 8 hours later... still waiting for my bookmarks to be fully imported...

My Diigo Tags