BP5_2009102_SocialBookmarking

Social Bookmarking in Education

There are a wide variety of uses and benefits of social bookmarking in relation to education and instruction. This useful Web 2.0 tool accomplishes many of the objectives inherent in current educational goals and perspectives. First, social bookmarking can produce educators who are more informed on current research. For example, teachers can search for several sites and other links on Internet, save them immediately, share those links with other teachers, and organize those links for easy and expedient access in the future. These bookmarks are then available to teachers at any time without a platform giving teachers support for their class lectures and lesson plans (Grosseck, 2008).

The second benefit and utility of social bookmarking in education is that it creates a collaborative environment in which students can share links with classmates or students from anywhere in the world (Educase Learning Initiative, 2005). In this way, social bookmarking is also beneficial to teachers because it offers them a way to maintain lines of communicating. This, for example, helps teachers remain part of a professional community through sharing perspectives on information beneficial for training or other instruction as part of Personal Learning Communities (Solomon & Schrum, 2007). Both students and teachers benefit from the collaboration that is key aspect of a variety of social bookmarking sites.

As a result of collaborative nature of social bookmarking, another benefit to the educational environment is that it encourages accountability on the part of students. The process of tagging calls uses to make decisions about the words they choose in tagging links. This is also known as folksonomy and, as part of this process, users are in control of how others will be able to view and make use of links. Users must decide whether to be selfish, altruistic, friendly, or popular as the classify links and “the social benefit of such a classification consists in the user’s maturity” (Grosseck, 2008). This provides teachers the opportunity to instruct and set standards and requirements for ethical and accurate approaches to tagging.

Just as social bookmarking provides an opportunity for students to practice maturity and critical thinking skills when tagging, it also provides a similar opportunity with source evaluation. Because of the way social bookmarking requires users to view and tag links, users must also make value judgments about the links that they choose to tag. This can be a benefit of social bookmarking in relation to education because it will help train students to evaluate sources. As students weed out invalid or unreliable sources they will contribute to the validity and reliability of the links that their classmates and others will find on their sites. In the end, the more users who access social bookmarking sites “the more value accrues to the system itself and thereby to all who participate in it” (Hammand, Hannay, Lund, & Scott, 2005).

References

Hammon, T., Hannay, T., Lund, B. & Scott, J. (2005). Social bookmarking tools: a general review. D-Lib Magazing, 11(4). Retrieved from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html

Grosseck, G. (2007). Using de.licio.us in education. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/212002/Using-delicious-In-Education

Educase Learning Initiative. (2005). 7 things you should know about social bookmarking. Retrieved from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf

Solomon, G & Schrum, L. (2007). Web 2.0: new tools, new schools. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.