Social Bookmarking In Education

Social bookmarking is a new trend in education that is starting to take hold in today’s classrooms.  Social bookmarking is saving essentially saving your bookmarks in a public place for other users to access.  A person could then search “tag” those links with keywords relating to the link so other users can easily search for them.

In a classroom setting this can have enormous benefits.  For example:  An instructor could design a lesson plan that includes internet research.  Then they could post a number of links on the subject to a site such as http://delicious.com/ and direct their students there, thus giving their students a repository of information that they have available.  Taking that a step further, students could then be required to find more links outside of what the instructor has provided them with to add to the social bookmarking list.  This would provide an ever-growing amount of information that both the instructor and the students have available to them.

There can be some drawbacks with a service like this however.  First is the verification that the links actually work.  While most social networking sites do verify that links are correct and functioning, they don’t do it on a daily basis.  If a link has gone down or become outdated there is still a chance that it will be posted on the site.  If you’re an educator this can look bad on you since you’re responsible for the content in your class.  Another drawback is verifying that the link is relevant to the topic.  Many tags for a link can overlap and it would be up the instructor to make sure that a link is relevant to the topic.

Social Bookmarking in Education

This is a good blog about social bookmarking and education.  It discusses the two biggest social bookmarking sites, FURL which has become Diigo and delicious.  Also contains information on two targets types of social bookmarking sites, Flickr, and CiteuLike.

'Social Bookmarking' Site for Higher Education Makes Debut

Excellent article about a new social bookmarking site that is going to cater to students and educators called Brainify.com.  This website is restricted to people with a .edu email address so as to keep it confined to the realm of academia.  Other features such as Blackboard are also going to be incorporated into this site.

Social Bookmarking

This website contains a video tutorial on what social bookmarking along with a video tutorial of Diigo.  Gives examples of other peoples social bookmarking pages along with links to other social bookmarking websites.

7 Things You Need To Know About Social Bookmarking

This PDF discusses the basics of what you need to know about social bookmarking.  It covers what it is, how it can be used in education, and what some of its pitfalls are.  This is a very useful source of information if you’re unfamiliar with the concept of social networking.

Social Bookmarking In Education (different from the first one)

Another article that goes over how social bookmarking can be used in education.  Focuses on some of the functions and how they apply directly to education along with links to other social networking services.