Using Web 2.0 applications in the classroom: #2 Social Bookmarking to organize and share resources

What is social bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".
(definition of social bookmarking by Wikipedia)

To get a better idea about what social bookmarking is and how it is advantageous, watch this short video from the Common Craft Show.



Getting started with social bookmarking using Diigo


Diigo is a social bookmarking service established in 2006. It's late arrival on the web compared to other social bookmarking services like Delicious (2003) means it has a smaller user base, but has learnt from the inadequacies of earlier services and thereby provides other features which other social bookmarking services do not - including special educator accounts that allow teachers to set up class groups. To get a good overview of what Diigo offers, get me to give you a demo, or just watch this promo video.



The advantages of using Diigo in the classroom are:

1. Bookmarks are stored online and can be accessed from any computer.
2. Teachers can share links with students (no more writing long URLs on the board) and students can share links with each other.
3. Bookmarks are categorised and searchable for simple retrieval later on.
4. Important parts of pages can be highlighted to make located specific information easily retrievable later.
5. Sticky notes can be attached to highlighted sections of pages. This means that with the web and Diigo, a complete replacement for manual (handwritten) note-taking in research is available. Indeed, once a student is familiar with Diigo, the process of note-taking in research becomes much more efficient.
6. Educator accounts are available (upon application) which allows a teacher to have a "teacher's console". This allows a teacher to set up class group. The class group can easily share links and message each other in forums. The teacher can see and monitor all students' bookmarks.
7. If students are submitting work online in the form of blogs, teachers can use the highlighting and sticky notes to offer comments to students about their work.
8. Diigo has "webslides" which allows users to assemble links in a list and then play them back as slides (eg: like MS PowerPoint).

For a more extended demonstration of how to use the highlighting and note-taking feature of Diigo check out this video by a teacher.

Social Bookmarking with Delicious

If you're a frequent web surfer like me, you'll inevitably come across the problem of where to save all the great links you come across. If you save them using your web browser's bookmarks, you'll soon find these bookmarks becoming cluttered and disorganised. And then if you're away from your computer you don't have access to them. There has to be a better way to organise your favourite links, right?

There is, and it's called social bookmarking. There are several sites sites (web applications) that offer this social bookmarking service. These social bookmarking sites allow you to save your favourite links and to organise them use tags. The reason they are social is because they are publicly available. This means you can access them when you're away from your computer, and so can your friends and colleagues.

You will notice in there is a block in the right hand side of this blog titled "my delicious links". This contains tags of sites that I've favourited using the Delicious social bookmarking service. You can also check out my bookmarks by going here. I'm encouraging all my students to use social bookmarking as a way of keeping track of useful and interesting sites they have visited. To find out more about social bookmarking and how to get started with Delicious, watch this excellent video from Common Craft first: