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Social bookmarking in education

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Social bookmarking can be a helpful tool to support E-Learning. It can be used as a first step or as a single part of a virtual educational environment.
If you want to point your students’ interest to WWW pages you recently found, social bookmarks may be the right thing for you.

How to proceed

Let’s imagine you never did social bookmarking before. Register at any service (read here to make a first choice) to make a test. Play and look around there. Think about the categories and / or tags (keywords) that are important to your classes. You will see that there is a RSS icon (in most cases at the bottom of the page). They link to RSS feeds. These feeds can be used for being kept informed about the bookmarks you added.
Students can access your bookmarks via RSS, with the help of a program (Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera M2 and many more) or an on-line aggregator (e. g. Bloglines). The only thing you have to tell them the adress of the RSS feed.

Participation by commenting

Students’ participation can consist of two things: a) comment the bookmarks and / or b) contribute more links. If you want to have your bookmarks commented, a weblog might be much more functional (see below), though this feature exists at least with openBM or you choose a web annotation service, e. g. Gibeo or Wikalong, an extension for Firefox.

Participation by contributing

If you want your students to contribute bookmarks, you can do one of the following things:

use specific tags
form groups
build your own system

Use any specific tag (maybe an enigmatic combination of letters, e. g. dmkl205) or a combination of various tags (e. g. literature, sartre and existencialism). This is a very simple solution, and anybody – also those who don’t belong to your class – can contribute (you will find this solution at Rebecca Hedreen).

Many services (Spurl with its streams, CiteULike, unalog and igooi) offer an alternative. In all these cases you are able to form groups with same interests and – if you prefer – with restricted access (unalog has no restriction).

To use your own server and system is another way to work with. Three systems can be recommended

Scuttle (very similar to del.icio.us, see here)
Sitebar – Version 3.3rc1 finally provides RSS feeds
unalog needs a lot of others modules to work – this is a solution for those with a server of their own.

Functions

Social bookmarking can be a time-saving feature for teachers and students.
It depends on your classes’ needs. Tell your students to

comment, evaluate or rate the mentioned sources (one of the most difficult things to learn)
find, contribute and present their own bookmarks about a subject
use them for further reading about a topic
learn how to use social bokmarking for their studies in general
understand how to tag and how to use tags to find information

In some cases, it might be more useful to use a weblog instead, e. g. if you want to have comments. You can find more about weblogs in education at BildungsBlog: Weblogs for Learning or University of Minnesota: Into the blogosphere.

# · 1. April 2005, 13:45 · 529 Wörter
Kategorien social bookmarks & tagging · Tags: bildung, scuttle, socialbookmarks
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