Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking allows users to engage in a collaborative construction of knowledge where participants share, connect, and create. With social bookmarks, users read what others read as well as organize information within a community of researchers.

Common Craft explains Social Bookmarking in Plain English

What are tags?
Tags are what make social bookmarking so powerful. Think of “tags” as keywords to the site you are viewing. Each time you save a website you will want to “tag” it with a unique word. You can tag sites with one or several words. Websites with the same tags are linked together and users may use the tags to search for sites with similar information. For example, if you find a great site for teaching fractions you may want to tag it with “fractions” and “math.” This system is great for organizing your bookmarks but it goes even further when someone else posts related content using the same tags. A collaborative repository of organized information begins to emerge.

Tags are often represented in “tag clouds”. A tag cloud is a set of related tags with corresponding weights. Typically tag clouds have 30-150 tags and the weights are represented using font size. Tag clouds are frequently hyperlinked allowing users to drill down on the data.

The Power of Social Bookmarking
By now it is clear that social bookmarking empowers users to organize and find relevant information. The great thing about social bookmarking is the fact that within the community of “researchers” on these sites accepted tagging systems are emerging called folksonomies. In contrast to taxonomies, which classify and categorize information, a folksonomy is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.

A December 2006 survey found that 28% of Internet users have tagged or categorized content online. Furthermore, on a typical day 7% of Internet users indicated that they tag or categorize online content online.
Pew Internet and American Life Project Online Activities and Pursuits - Tagging

Social Bookmarks in the Classroom
Explore the following social bookmarking resources:
7 Things you should now about social bookmarking
Site to See: Social Bookmarking

Ideas for using social bookmarking in the classroom

• Share bookmarks with parents to help their children find valuable and relevant resources.


• Have students brainstorm keywords to build folksonomies.


• Develop a tagging system so students can easily find quality resources.


• Collaborate using special tags to collect and organize bookmarks that are relevant and useful to entire groups.


• Browse other people’s favorite bookmarks who have already found information on subjects of interest to you.

To see the power of social bookmarking in practice explore the following site at the University of Pennsylvania . This site acts as a central location that students can access and contribute to covering many topics and projects.
http://tags.library.upenn.edu/

Exploring Delicious

Delicious , like other social bookmarking sites, allows users to read and connect with what others are reading.

Activity
Complete the Techtorial – Bookmarking without Boarders

Create a site on Delicious.
The first thing you may notice is how simple del.icio.us is in design. To register all you need to do is add a username, select a password and you are ready to go.
A beginners guide to Delicious

1. Type in a keyword of interest and see how many others have tagged information with the same keyword.


2. Click on several of the sites and read the comments.


3. Check out this site of frequently used tags on Delicious http://del.icio.us/tag/


4. Add several websites and tag them. You will see a field for tags when editing or saving a bookmark. You may enter as many tags as you want with each one separated by a space. When adding tags you may want to think about words that will help you remember the site. You will also see a list of popular tags, which represents the tags other people have used for this site as well as recommended tags which are a combination of tags you have used and what other people have use for this same site.


5. It is easy to check to see who else have saved websites using the same tags as you. Type in the following address: http://del.icio.us/thenameof yourtag.

Absolutely Delicious Tools Collection

Check out my site on del.icio.us:
http://del.icio.us/maryebennett

furl is another social bookmarking site finding its way into the classroom. What sets furl apart is the fact that you can save an entire “snapshot” of the entire page so when one of your favorites in no longer available on the Web you have a copy of your furled pages.