Horizonau2008:Social Bookmarking

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2008 Horizon.au Short List

2008 Horizon.au Short List pdf.gif

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

Critical Challenges

Key Trends

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

The practice of bookmarking useful online resources is as old as the web browser, yet the browser approach forces a fixed hierarchy which becomes unwieldy as the collection grows. More recently, tools that allow sharing, publishing, and easy searching of bookmarks have added a social dimension to a once private task. Annotated, tagged lists are easy to create with tools like Del.icio.us, Bb Scholar, Diigo, and Zotero, and using them, class and study groups, communities of practice, and scholars can share and compare resources they have found. As these lists grow, many tools make it easy to see which materials have been linked to most often, providing an intuitive sense of value. Many tools also allow viewers to annotate links, and even content within websites, and share their annotations with others.

There is a downside to the uninformed use of these tools, however. Bookmarking is not reading or research; the simple sharing of links can be and often is a cursory, surface-level activity. If, however, social bookmarking is used as a way to share carefully vetted or considered resources, it is a very powerful and substantive tool. In the hands of students, it can also be a powerful way to develop information and knowledge management skills.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression

  • Social bookmarking harnesses serendipity for educational gain: scholars can spend less time searching and more time reading resources collected and marked by their peers, enabling them to discover sources they might otherwise have missed.
  • Engaging in social bookmarking enables learners to develop their own information management skills and practices while also contributing to dynamic, collaborative collections with their peers.
  • Curating a bookmark collection presents opportunities for students to reinforce knowledge and information management skills.

Examples

There are numerous examples of courses, professional organizations, and other educational groups using social bookmarking to create and organize resource lists – including the Horizon Project itself.

  • A Trinity College course used Del.icio.us to create a reading list — and encouraged students to add to it: http://del.icio.us/smartmobs
  • Attendees and staff of the NSW Learnscope 07 Conference bookmarked related resources on Technorati, Flickr, Slideshare, Del.icio.us, and other sites: http://nswlearnscope.com (the tag is nswlearnscope07)

For Further Reading

How Del.icio.us Is Changing Academic Research
http://landscape.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-delicious-is-changing-academic.html
(Jo Guldi, Inscape, 22 March 2007.) This blog post discusses ways Del.icio.us is used for academic research.

Social Bookmarking in Plain English
http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english
(Lee LeFever, Common Craft, 7 August 2007.) This brief (3.5-minute) video explains social bookmarking, using Del.icio.us as an example, in an engaging format.



Sandbox Discussion (July-August 2008)

The practice of bookmarking useful online resources is as old as the web browser, yet the browser approach forces a fixed hierarchy which grows unwieldy as the collection grows. More recently, tools that allow sharing and publishing of bookmarks have turned a once-private task into a social activity. Annotated lists are easy to create with tools like Del.icio.us, Bb Scholar, Diigo, and Zotero. Communities of practice, class groups, study groups, researchers and scholars can share and compare resources they have found. As the lists grow, a kind of informal peer review process causes the best materials to float to the top. Current tools even allow viewers to annotate websites and their annotations with others. While social bookmarking is used by many professional networks, it is not widely used for teaching and learning yet.


Why is this topic relevant to teaching, learning or creative expression?

  • Students in the same area but with different interests will search and find related things in different ways that others might not find
  • Information and resources are vast and growing so quickly it is untenable for a single person to organize- social bookmarking builds on the concepts of crowdsourcing; collections can be done as groups of people with common interests (project groups, classes, within a discipline) but enables easy cross over into multiple disciplines. Collections are dynamic and can be "synidcated" e.g. dynamically updated, in other web pages, as well as on different devices.
  • Capitalizes on notions of mobility already prevalent in the workforce and education
  • Releases user from being software dependent on local machine
  • Enables people to subscribe to individual users and therefore track what key people in your area of expertise have found
  • Enables formation of knowledge networks both within existing classes and the global community at large
  • Enables mining the collective intelligence of the planet
  • Your own bookmarks become part of the growing body of knowledge
  • Fits within a decentralised model of knowledge distribution
  • Potential for first year plus educators to be assisted by experienced teachers who have categorised quality materials
  • Enables learners to develop their own information management skills and practices
  • Supports knowledge/ resource sharing amongst professional networks and project teams
  • Students can 'curate' their own tag collections, this could be for research, collaboration and assessment
  • Teacher can tag with a subject specific tag which students subscribe to via RSS which becomes an ongoing reading list and bibliography
  • A cohort can use common tag to build a major collection of references (formal and informal) for a subject, which can be added to and used for new iterations of the subject
  • More sophisticated tagging, eg tagging video clips and sound files, allows for novel forms of integration on webpages for coursework and study
  • Can aggregate tagged content via RSS into common course pages, and students can also aggregate this via their blogs, or via a RSS reader


  • add your idea here [LJ]

Please list links to local or international projects that are experimenting with or implementing this technology.

  • A pilot implementation of social bookmarking by University of Melbourne first-year Arts students in 2008 had the aims of sharing potential essay references, developing skills in critical evaluation of websites and building online community, using Diigo. http://www.bmu.unimelb.edu.au/research/netgen/pilot.html
  • RMIT Media program 'Mog' blog which reblogs individual student blog content to one location which students can use via RSS, all reblogged posts are tagged - http://media.rmit.edu.au/mog/
  • RMIT Media program, second year subject 'Integrated Media' that uses the subject code as a delicious tag to provide a reference/research/interest tag cloud for students, see http://delicious.com/vogmae/comm2251
  • add your project link here [LJ]

Please provide links to any local or international reports, papers, or articles that either help define the topic, or that provide detailed information about it.

  • Heurist is a free online academic database service developed at the University of Sydney to store internet bookmarks, bibliographic references and research data in a single integrated database. http://heuristscholar.org/
  • Social bookmarking is including in this paper which provides examples of referencing and citation of web 2.0 content in scholarly and scientific communication, and concludes that the conceptual basis of referencing and citation as expressed in current systems and standards needs reform in order to bring academic integrity to the use of these new forms of authorship. Gray, K., Thompson, C., Clerehan, R., Sheard, J., & Hamilton, M. (in press). Web 2.0 authorship: Issues of referencing and citation for academic integrity. The Internet and Higher Education. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2008.03.001
  • list your resource link here [LJ]

Please add any other information that may be helpful to the staff as they write up this topic.


  • Here is a select review of educational angles of SB that I have been adding to for the past year - please use as needed.


What it is:

You can store a list of Internet resources that you are interested in, on a web site that is maintained as a service to web users. You can assign your own keywords, tags comments and reviews to each resource. You can share your bookmarks with all web users and with special interest groups. The SB web site can display rankings of resources including tag clouds, provide RSS feeds, integrate with other kinds of web sites such as blogs. Some support formation of password-only groups. You may be able to save annotated versions of the websites that show your highlighting and sticky notes. You may be able to import and export records from other bookmarking sites; those services that are more academically oriented also enable importing and exporting of bookmarks between the web site and personal reference management software. Wikipedia examples: http://del.icio.us http://www.connotea.org http://digg.com/ http://www.citeulike.org http://blogs.zanestate.edu/mybookmarks/

Ways of using social bookmarking in higher education:

“Outboard memory,” a location to store links that might be lost to time, scattered across different browser bookmark settings, or distributed in e-mails, printouts, and Web links. Finding people with related interests can magnify one’s work by learning from others or by leading to new collaborations. Offer new perspectives on one’s research, as clusters of tags reveal patterns (or absences) not immediately visible by examining one of several URLs. Create multi-authored bookmark pages can be useful for team projects, as each member can upload resources discovered, no matter their location or timing. Tagging can then surface individual perspectives within the collective. Give insights into the list owner’s (or owners’) research, which could play well in a classroom setting as an instructor tracks students’ progress. Students, in turn, can learn from their professor’s discoveries. Source: Alexander (2006)

Teacher keeps current resources list on the web; easy to access and update from any web anywhere / anytime, easy to share with students and colleagues; easy to find and join, or set up and recruit to, an interest group Students required to keep their list of sources / readings up to date, for ready review by teacher and / or other students. Source: Lomas (2005)

Student project teams or tutor groups can share bookmarks and comments privately amongst themselves Student e-portfolio component Students use as a resource throughout their registration period, and even beyond (i.e. when they graduate); Students share knowledge between cohorts (e.g. so one year's cohort can leave a legacy to the next cohort). Source: Hirst (2005)

Library service adjunct, to build user communities. Source Skiba (2006)

Learning activities that are student-centred, offer collaboration opportunities, allow creativity and reflection, and facilitate electronic literacy skills. Source: Godwin-Jones (2006)

Learning activities that provide various forms of feedback to the student, via browsing, web syndication and third party applications. Source: Menchen (2005)

Learning activities that are immediate and social. Source: Lorenzo et al. (2006)

Commenting and rating on bookmarked urls can be used for recommending as well as for helping decision-making and critical thinking. Source: Vuorikari (2005)

Social bookmarking issues for academic writing and assessment:

Easy to create superficial content, not as intellectually demanding as traditional academic writing. Systems and standards for preservation / archiving of microcontent. Copyright and violations, at the level of microcontent. Source: Alexander (2006)

Folksonomies - tags are assigned by people who are not classification and cataloguing experts Lists can be plagiarised as easily as any other web content Source: Lomas (2005)

Teacher or Learning Management System controls over levels of moderation and shared access If part of the learning strategy, needs to be carefully managed to ensure that it is capable of delivering whatever the learning designer requires If part of formal e-learning system, need user guidelines re what may (not) be published Source: Hirst (2005)

Can keep track of who uses what lists to create new ones, and thus acknowledges those whose work influences later work Source: Skiba (2006)

Most tagging sites are English language only Source: Godwin-Jones (2006)

Susceptible to control and spam by unbalanced interests Source: Menchen (2005)

Concerns about the quality of the content Risks of misunderstandings due to lack of knowledge about how the web works Source: Lorenzo et al. (2006)

Tagging motivations or “disciplines” can range from selfish through to altruistic. Social bookmarking can be thought of as bare-bones blogging. Source: Hammond et al. (2005)

References:

Alexander, B. (2006). Web 2.0: a new wave of innovation for teaching and learning? Educause Review 41(2), 33-44. http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm06/erm0621.asp

Godwin-Jones, R. (2006). Tag clouds in the blogosphere: electronic literacy and social networking. Language Learning & Technology 10(2), 8-15. http://llt.msu.edu/vol10num2/pdf/emerging.pdf

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

Hirst, A. (2005). Towards a managed social bookmarking environment in higher education. http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/005107.html

Lomas, C. (2005). 7 things you should know about social bookmarking. Educause Learning Initiative. http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ELI7001

Lorenzo, G., Oblinger, D., & Dziuban, C. (2006). How choice, co-creation, and culture are changing what it means to be net savvy. Educause Learning Initiative. http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ELI3008

Menchen, E. (2005, June). Feedback, motivation and collectivity in a social bookmarking system. Paper presented at the Kairosnews Computers and Writing Online Conference. http://www.erickaakcire.net/delicious/pilot/pilotpaper.pdf

Skiba, D. (2006). Web 2.0: next great thing or just marketing hype? Nursing Education Perspectives 27(4), 212-214. https://wiki.umn.edu/twiki/bin/viewfile/TELGrantCohortA/ListOfResources?rev=1;filename=hype.pdf

Vuorikari, R. (2005). Social networking software and e-portfolios foster digital learning networks. Insight Observatory for New Technologies in Education Special Report. http://insight.eun.org/ww/en/pub/insight/misc/specialreports/digital_knowledge_artefacts.htm

Wikipedia. Social bookmarking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

Additional resources:

Everhart, D., Kunnen, E., & Shelton, K. (2007) From Information Literacy to Scholarly Identity: Effective Pedagogical Strategies for Social Bookmarking. Session presented at Educause 2007 Conference, Seattle, 25 October. http://www.educause.edu/E07/Program/11073?PRODUCT_CODE=E07/SESS057 - gives ideas for higher education, using the SB tool Blackboard Scholar

LeFever, L. (2007). Social bookmarking in plain English. [video] Commoncraft.com. http://youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU - shows general principles, using the SB tool Del.icio.us


  • list your idea or information here [LJ]
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