...Start strength training. Buy a mountain bike. Every new workout gives a stronger foundation to your fitness program. – Amby Burfoot,
Runner’s World magazine
Here we are – one new exercise to add to my repertoire! This week’s social bookmarking topic has been reminiscent of that wonderful children’ picture book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Remember how it goes, the child gives the mouse a cookie and then he asks for a glass of milk, then he has a milk mustache and wants to wash up, then he looks in the mirror and decides to give himself a haircut, and so on, and so on… Exploring the class Trailfire has led me from one aspect of social bookmarking to another and then off on another link to explore another aspect, then back to the Trailfire, then over to Commoncraft and back to Wikipedia, then to the delicious website, to email tech colleagues to question if they use Delicious or Diigo, investigating Twitter to learn more about this app, figuring out how to insert a video into my blog, then back to the Trailfire, making notes in a word document for my blog entry … It was all good, all interesting, all major learning curve but scattered and certainly not lineal and then I realized that something has happened to my brain and my thought processes are beginning to morph and…OMG…I’m turning into my teen-aged son! This computer technology stuff is becoming easier, I can talk about it, problem solve my way through most things, take quantum leaps all over the place from one platform to another and it’s all starting to make sense.
Social Bookmarking, now here’s a topic with instant appeal to my tidy, highly-organized character; after all I’m a teacher librarian. The chaos in the 2.0 Land which is my desktop has gone on long enough and learning a method of “organizing this puppy” and being able to easily retrieve specific information held great appeal. I needed no real convincing like I did with blogs, for I’ve already heard glowing recommendations from colleagues and had the motivation of needing to feel more in control of the “virtual heaps of information” coming my way. The Commoncraft video, Wikipedia article and Richardson’s words in Chapter 6, beautifully set the stage and I jotted down some initial questions which came to mind to guide my inquiries:
• How do spelling errors and capitalization affect tags? (Somewhat, but mistags can be corrected when noted.)
• What are the applications for students? Can the teacher share links? (Many! Yes!)
• Are privacy and safety issues for students with social bookmarking? (No, and you can set different privacy levels)
• If I change from one software to another can I easily transport my URLs and tags or do I start over from scratch? (Yes, easily ported.)
• Will I need to continue to use my computer to bookmark sites? (Social bookmarking software can do it all, personal preference)
Next I went through every Trailfire link, taking notes on all the new things I learned and finding the answers to my guiding questions.
In this age of automation, I find it interesting that the advantages of social bookmarking all point to the use of a human-generated classification framework that uses tags. These tags reflect connections and relationships between items that no robot website spider could ever analyze. The tags help to rank a resource, indicating its usefulness and provide links to other valuable sites through the collaborative aspect of this practice. 7 Things You Should Know about Social Bookmarking, states that the informal organizational structure of these sites actually encourages connections between like-minded individuals and can lead to serendipitous discoveries when we examine how others have tagged their websites. I find it intriguing that this folksonomy of keywords is not static but is constantly changing to “result in a ranking system that functions as a collaborative filter.” Since I haven’t had much experience with tagging (do Dewey subject headings count?) this freedom to choose your own categories is hard to fathom. I wondered about using singular or plural forms of nouns or spelling errors but apparently this flexible system functions regardless. I’m sure I’ll figure out all the quirky bits with practice. In the meantime, I went back and added tags to my blog posts.
Social bookmarking is an amazing 2.0 tool given the ability to save, sort, organize, protect research, allow easy access, share, collaborate, deliver information through feeds and even report if URLs no longer work. In the Trailfire articles I read, the disadvantages of social bookmarking seem minimal given their capacity to simplify information storage. The chief concern is deciding on which software to use given the many options available and then becoming familiar with it. I visited both the Delicious and Diigo sites and found it really tough to decide which to use, given that they were both recommended by colleagues. Our District IT Teacher admitted that she’s using Delicious and probably should be using Diigo but just doesn’t have the time to sit down and relearn a new software. I loved the simple “beginner friendly” look of Delicious and Richardson prefers it but after watching the Diigo introductory video which explained its additional options (and where I learned to pronounce the darn name) and reading Steve Hargadon’s Cool Tools recommendations , I was torn! I’ve decided to set up accounts with each, play about and then choose the one I find most useful and stick with it.
In any case the applications of social bookmarking for teaching are numerous and very practical. This is one 2.0 tool which doesn’t have teachers thinking, “How can I find ways of integrating this technology into the curriculum?” Instead social bookmarking becomes an integral component of the lesson, especially for those topics that are research-based. From a teacher librarian perspective, I love the opportunities it affords to teach search strategies, evaluation of websites, author validity, currency, authority, objectivity and model the act of collaboration. These are important information skills we need to teach our students and working as a community to identify useful sites, bookmarking and tagging these and sharing the wealth of resources helps to level the information literate playing field. I read about setting up class resources on the school library page, structuring tagging to make retrieval easier for specific class studies and want to learn more about how this works. I am interested in contacting others for professional networking and how bookmarking can benefit my areas of interest and study. For years I’ve been photocopying covers of books, recording my comments and annotations and filing these pages in a binder. Now I can explore Shelfari in more detail or consider using LibraryThing to keep track of what I read and gather suggestions from others with similar reading tastes. I can’t wait to embark on these projects and learn how they work so I can promote them with my high school staff and students.
As Richardson points out in Taming the Beast, “developing self-organizational skills in this world of overwhelming information is key to enhancing your professional and personal learning practice. And the good news is, with tags and folksonomies, we’re all in this together.” It will be very empowering for me to be able to use these social bookmarking tools to create sense and order from the many wonderful online resources, or as Hargadon calls them “found treasure on the web”. Once I get my own house in order I will be more confident sharing the advantages of social bookmarking with others.
