Social Bookmarking
One of the first interesting articles I found on how to use Social Bookmarking as an educator was on how one library choose to use Social Bookmarking to organize their whole online resource systems. “By using Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites, libraries can more easily manage subject guides and other lists of Web resources. Social bookmarking services such as Delicious provide a one-click method to bookmark a Web site, allowing librarians to describe and categorize Web sites” (Corrado, 2008). This made a huge amount of sense because often I send students to our library to do a research project, but they will come back with projects that use things like “Wikipedia” as a reference. In order to guide their research I will often pre-research for them and then give them a list of acceptable URLs for them to use for their assignment. This method does not really fix the overall problem though because I am not teaching my students to how to research appropriate sites online and how to decipher “good” sites from “bad” ones. If our library was to use a Social Bookmarking site, like “Delicious”, and tag good websites by categories, students good just go in and search through the tags to find the websites they need for their project. Students could also tag sites they think are appropriate and then share them with me to make sure they have found reliable sites to use for their research projects. In this same idea, students could then share their tagged sites with other students to help collaborate in their research and find the best sites possible.
The second interesting article I found on the use of Social Bookmarking as an educator was on a study that tried to find the most popular news cites as a means to draw conclusions on what type of news media people use most frequently. “This study examined the selection and sharing of news stories from Delicious, a popular social bookmarking site, in order to identify the most frequently consulted news information sources and news topics”(Chung and Yi, 2009). I found this study to be fascinating because as a Journalism teacher I am teaching my students to create Newspapers, but according to this study it showed that most people are turning to blogs and other online news sources for their daily news updates. This trend could suggest that Newspapers and even TV News Broadcasting could become a thing of the past. “Social media sources, primarily blogs, are growing as a major news source… What online news audiences consider to be news is becoming increasingly broad and complex with unclassified sources dominating tagged stories”(Chung and Yi, 2009). It would be really interesting to have my Journalism students recreate this study by using “Delicious” for one month and bookmarking any online “News” site that they use in that time. We could even do a poll of our students to see what news sources they use. We could then compile all of that information by having students share their “delicious” news tags and then (ironically) write an article about the types of news trends we are seeing at our school and whether print media is soon to be a thing of the past.
The third article I found pertained to using Social Bookmarking as a means to further Art education specifically. “…this article details potential uses of delicious, flickr, blogs, podcasts, and wiki. Through these technologies, students may collaboratively build knowledge, develop a deeper understanding of their own artworks and those of other artists, and interact with artworks in new ways” (Buffinton, 2008). The idea was that Art students could use Social networks to share their pieces of art online, but also use Social Bookmarking sites to share inspirational Art sites they had found during research. This would be especially helpful in an Art History class where students would need to look at a lot of different artists in a short period of time. You could have each student research a specific artists and then use “Delicious” to bookmark all the helpful websites they found on their specific author. Then before a test all the students could share their artist tags with all of their fellow students and it would be like one big study guide that the students created themselves. All in all, I found that most of the research about Social Bookmarking was extremely positive and the possibilities of using it in an educational environment seem endless.
References
Chung, D and Kwan Yi. (2009, July). Distribution of news information through social bookmaking: an examination of shared stories in the Delicious website. Information Research. Retrieved November 8, 2009, from http://informationr.net/ir/index.html
Corrado, E. (2008). Delicious Subject Guides: Maintaining Subject Guides Using a Social Bookmaking Site. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library & Information practice & Research. Retrieved November 8, 2009, from http://www.apla.ca/ejournal.cfm
Buffington, M. (2008). Creating and Consuming Web 2.0 in Art Education. Computers in the Schools. Retrieved November 8, 2009, from http://www.haworthpress.com/journals/dds.asp
Megan, I found your second find very interesting too. I also taught journalism and think it would be great to do this in place of a school newspaper. You could go green! It would be interesting to research how many schools are actually doing this already and to be one of the leaders. I think recreting the study is an awesome idea. I would bet your students would be ready to run with it knowing they would be part of something bigger than just the paper/blog and "real world." How fun! Great post!
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