Social Bookmarking

To quote an old, but true saying, learning is a journey. Before you leave, you have to know where you are going. When I first heard of social bookmarking last week, I knew I was travelling into utterly new territory, so I decided I had better get some information before I went anywhere. You need to be prepared before you take a road trip.

My first information came from travellers more familiar with the route. Laura K. Brooks, in her article "Old School, Meet New School Library 2.0" mentions del.ici.ous. Miguel Guhlin in his article, "The CTO Challenge: Building Your Personal Network," talks about both del.icio.us and diigo. Both authors see them as excellent organizational tools for reading on the web. I then watched the Youtube video  'Social Bookmarking in Plain English' which dealt primarily with del.icio.us and the demo video at www.diigo.com/index to learn about diigo. What I learned was that the two tools, although both used for organizing reading, are different. Delicious lets you gather and share bookmarked websites, while Diigo lets you bookmark sites and have online conversations about them. 

In order to gain more information, I then read our text, Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts by Will Richardson.  He helped to further define the differences between the two sites pointing out that  with Diigo, you can save links, annotate, tag, organize and share. He says it enables you to read and connect with what others read to create a community of researchers gathering information for you. Miguel Guhlin called it a personal learning network (PLN).  Del..icious, on the other hand, is more about sharing links with others. It offers less options. 

As I read through the chapter on 'The Social Web' in Richardson's book, I found certain alarm bells going off. First, I was troubled by the comment that in a traditional classroom most student work is done in isolation (pg. 86). I feel my classroom is fairly traditional in many ways, yet my students are encouraged to collaborate and peer assess at every opportunity. I know this is true of other classrooms as well. I don't know if this has increased because of the way we look at learning due to the internet or not, but I do know collaborative groups have been around far longer than the world wide web, they were just far more limited because we could not connect globally like we can now. My other concern is that many classrooms don't have access to computers all the time. In our school,you need to book the lab., and they are not always readily available. If you base your lessons on computer based activities, you might end up doing a lot of filler activities until you can get to the lab, or you get the lab, and the server is down.

The other alarm bell comes whenever I consider time. It is fine to say that now we can access  people who share our  interests and learn from them by looking at their reading lists and getting into discussions with them, but in my head I think,"I can't even read all the things I've chosen to read, how can I now start to look at countless articles others have read and discuss them in a meaningful way?" It is like when you attend a great pro-d workshop and go back to your classroom gung-ho to implement all the things you've learned. You try the first few then the rest remain filed away and forgotten as the next pro-d opportunity arises and more information is sent your way. I'm not seeing the difference between that and bookmarking articles that I never really get the chance to see. I am a strong proponent of quality not quantity

and although I see how the bookmarking cuts down on the quantity and gives us better quality because others of like mind and interest have selected them, it is still more than my brain will be able to deal with in a meaningful way.

I've taken a side trip , and need to get back to my journey. I now felt I had enough information to hit the road and try out the bookmarking sites. I followed the route provided by Will Richardson (pgs. 91-91) and found it utterly enlightening. I started by looking at the George Seimens' article on Connectivism, then went back to join Diigo. I was somewhat frustrated as it took quite  a while for the confirmation email to arrive, so I went to check out Richardson's connection to del.icio.us. I tried out the tag connectivism and, low and behold, one of the articles that popped up was Seimens'. I tried to look for the highlights Richardson had mentioned, but got frustrated and pulled into a rest area. My Diigo confirmation email was now in so I put in my diigolet button and explored the site.

I again pulled up the connectivism article and finally managed to see Richardson's highlights and stickys. I tried my own highlighting and found it very easy to do. I could not however manage to get my diigo account to link to my blog. (I have put my diigo link on my blog and have Myblog listed as one of the items on my reading list in Diigo). I noticed that Diigo also has a link to Delicious, and made a note to check that out later. I checked out another bookmark site, Blinklist, but found it to be smaller than the other two. It described  itself like 'itunes for web pages.' I did not get an opportunity to check Furl.net or ScuttlEDU. I need a lot more time to fully explore this tool, and the fact that  add on tools are constantly being created makes the task somewhat daunting.

Everyone I read who wrote about these bookmarking sites had suggestions for how to use it in a school setting. There were countless suggestions for using it for professional development, for collaboration with other teachers, for student research and for student collaboration. There were also suggestions for creating library reading lists and on line discussions about books. The suggestion that I liked best, was one that helps to answer a concern I had on my first blog entry. I love the idea of using it to give students feedback on their work. The idea of leaving feedback on student blog posts by highlighting and leaving annotations fulfills my need to interact with my text when I read or mark assignments. The fact that students can then collect the feedback across their posts to get an overview is amazing. How great is that for report cards? or just for parents to be able to see the feedback their child is getting?

I have started on this road trip and can see it is going to take many repeat journeys to be comfortable with where I am going. I'm also going to have to take a lot of side trips to keep abreast of the changing road conditions.