Social Bookmarking

Using the haystack to find your needle

With social bookmarking, the ability to access your bookmarks from any computer (hooray for cloud computing!) and to share your bookmarks with others is creating an opportunity for individuals to collaborate and communicate literally on a “world wide” scale. No longer having to work in isolation to do research, social bookmarking creates an online forum where contributors share their newest findings and favourite sites with others who share their interests.

When doing research on the Web, finding the exact information you are looking for is not always easy and can be a frustrating process.  Between the numbers of sites you have to search out and evaluate yourself, the time it takes to find exactly what you are looking for, and searching through all the extraneous information to get to what is considered pertinent and valid, is very much like searching for the proverbial “needle in a haystack”.  This is when social bookmarking  becomes extremely valuable to anyone doing research online.

One of the greatest strengths of using social bookmarking, is that many of the “haystacks” have already been searched and “tagged” by other interested parties.

Registering for access to a free site like Delicious.com or Diigo.com, you and your bookmarks become a part of a large, searchable (by tags), online data base. Unlike a Google search, the sites have already been identified through the process of tagging to be relevant, appropriate and related to your area of interest. Suddenly, (and as long as you agree with your “collaborators” on the relevance of the tag being given – more on this in a moment), you now have a direct line to the “needle” or “needles” you are looking for.

One of the major issues of concern comes from the ability of any user to identify what they consider relevant about a site. This process of users creating tags can be controversial since any word or words, and multiple tags can be attributed to the sites they are identifying.  This concept of tagging is referred to as a “folksonomy” and essentially takes the decision making done traditionally by professionals, (i.e. librarians or information architects) and places it in the hands of un-trained amateurs (Richardson, 2010). Although this may seem like a counter intuitive method, the hope is that as a community a more diplomatically developed process for tagging emerges and that multiple perspectives can contribute to a broader understanding of the topics being researched (Sturtz, 2008).

Reflections:

The more I explore these Web 2.0 tools and resources, the more I realize I am only beginning to understand and appreciate their potential.As a first time user of Social bookmarking, I was very excited about the prospects of using this social networking tool to help with research in both my professional and personal life.

I started my journey by researching the concept of social bookmarking and taking advantage of the bookmarking sites in the process. I registered with both Diigo (ohashi10) and Delicious (whb.ohashi10) and created bookmark lists in both. Both sites offered to allow me to upload my existing bookmarks from my “favourites”, but I decided to start fresh and begin stocking my sites with new bookmarks specifically related to my research on bookmarking (although I did get a little side tracked when I realized I could also find some great art and design sites as well).

Diigo does come well recommended (Richardson, 2010), but I found the interface and all the options and services of Diigo a bit overwhelming for a newbie like myself. I am not sure if it is because I was using the V5 beta version, but some of the tutorials available on vimeo and Youtube did not seem to apply to the current version. I also could not get Diigo’s Slideshow features to work for me and viewing the links from other users was difficult and cumbersome when having to flip back and forth between the Diigo site and the linked site. In the end, I much preferred to work with Delicious to get a “taste” (ha) of what these bookmarking sites can offer you.

Not only was it easy to begin gathering sites on Delicious, but the use of the “recommended” and “popular” tags made categorizing easy as well. Using these tags in my search criteria, I immediately found links to other related sites and users with common interests and interpretations of the tag criteria. I also like Delicious’ slideshow feature that allows you to scroll through the sites you and others have bookmarked so you can actually see the information in context before choosing to investigate further. So far, I have not found any issues with sites being tagged “inappropriately”, so perhaps critics of the folksonomy methods of classification needn’t be quite as concerned with the proliferation of misleading tags after all.

Personally:

I definitely see the potential of using these tools as I continue working on my M.Ed. The opportunity to connect with other educators and experts is a powerful and useful draw to continue working with the social bookmarking sites . I would also like to continue learning  how to take advantage of the many features that help organize and sort and collect information (I am very interested in the highlighting and sticky note features of Diigo, but I am currently unable to share the highlights and notes  I made since Diigo would only allow me to make my comments “private” , but also see that Delicious currently works with One note to reference information taken off the sites). One thing I will be doing immediately, will be to add my groups’ blogs to my bookmarks as private links. If I tag them in Delicious with a unique moniker, I will be able to see and visit them without having to sort through the “favorites” on my browser, or log into blogger or eclass to find the links (making it very easy to check out what everyone’s been up to without having to check for rss updates).

Professionally:

Using Delicious in the classroom with students would be an ideal way to build on contructivist principles of learning. Students could initially be “guided” in their searches for relevant information on a topic of study, but could eventually bring in their own links and resources to contribute to the “bank” of knowledge that would develop within the community of students and teachers. Students adding their own descriptions and creating their own “tags” would provide the opportunity to “voice” their own perspectives on or of a topic or issue being studied. Privacy setting and the ability to create anonymous usernames would also insure safety and or comfort levels.

It would still ultimately be the responsibility of the teacher to ensure students are prepared to work in this communal environment and adhere to proper “codes of conduct”, but even in the event that something “goes awry”, the teachable moment comes with students analyzing the choices made and discussing what the consequences could be to their understanding of the topic, how to make appropriate choices of what to post and what to ignore, how to analyse information from multiple sources, and taking the time to be critical of what they see and contribute to the community.

To leverage the strengths of social bookmarking, it is important that we do not “over protect” students to the point that they are unable to relate to the real world around them. Safety is critical and must be a priority, but at some point we also need to trust that students, as part of the community with their teachers, are learning the skills they need to keep themselves safe and to be critical thinkers beyond the confines of a classroom or school.

Closing thought:

While being able to access and share your bookmarks from any computer is a very useful ability to have available to us, social bookmarking sites are more than simply tools of convenience. They are not only powerful research and collaborative tools, but they are also a means for a community and potentially a society to both construct knowledge and develop a better and more broad understanding of the world around them.

Barney, E. (Creator). Social Bookmarking: Making the Web Work for You. [Video]
Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGXElviSRXM
Davis, L. (Creator). (2007). Getting started with Delicious. [Video]
Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGXElviSRXM
LeFever, L. (Creator). (2007). Social bookmarking in plain english. [Video]
Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeBmvDpVbWc
Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd Edition ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.Sturtz, D. N. (2004).
Sterling, B. (2005). Order Out of Chaos, Wired (issue 13.04).
Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/view.html?pg=4
Sturtz, D.N. (2004). Communal Categorization:The Folksonomy. Retrieved from http://davidsturtz.com/drexel/622/sturtz-folksonomy.pdf