What is social bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is a way of saving links to interesting resources found on the web for future use. Rather than simply bookmarking websites (saving links in a folder on your computer’s hard drive), social bookmarking saves the links to a public website. Users can create tags for each resource with searchable keywords and organize links in a more effective way than by using a linear folder structure. Additionally, social bookmarking allows users to search the bookmarks others have saved, exponentially increasing the number of resources one can find pertaining to a particular topic.
Who uses social bookmarking?
Anyone can use social bookmarking through public websites such as del.icio.us. Though still a new concept, social bookmarking is becoming more common. In the academic world, both professors and students are using social bookmarking to share Internet resources with others. As more people begin using social bookmarking, the resources available through keyword searches (i.e., tagging) multiply. Social bookmarking is changing the way some go about finding resources on the web.
Why should I use social bookmarking?
One of the greatest benefits of using social bookmarking is the ability to share bookmarks with others. Instructors and students can compile sets of online resources and make them readily available to the rest of the class. Also, because the bookmarks are saved to a public website rather than a personal hard drive, users can access their bookmarks no matter their location. The ability for any user to add bookmarks with searchable tags has the potential to give a broader range of resources for any given topic than a more traditional search engine would return. Some social bookmarking websites, such as citeulike, focus on scholarly works, primarily showcasing peer-reviewed papers for academic research and enrichment.
Examples of use in education:
Finding Resources
Collections of articles, scholarly papers, and webpages indexed using social bookmarking features (e.g. tagging, commenting, and evaluating).
http://www.citeulike.org/
http://scholar.com/userHomepage.dobbb?op=view
http://www.connotea.org/
Tool created by and for the use of UPenn Community.
http://tags.library.upenn.edu/
Tool created by Harvard Law School to group together series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.
http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/home.do
http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/98666 (site for Law of the Internet course)
Research Assignments
Examples of how social bookmarking can be used as part of a research assignment.
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/004404.html
Videos
A YouTube clone focused on videos related to education.
http://www.teachertube.com/
For more information:
Overviews of social bookmarking.
http://dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html
http://frequanq.blogspot.com/2005/02/social-bookmarking-in-education.html
http://www.teachinghacks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Social_bookmarking_tools
Guide for using social bookmarking.
http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/005136.html
An in depth case study on using Connotea.
http://dlib.org/dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html