Social bookmarking - ever heard of it? It’s yet another example of a powerful new way of collaborating. In the immortal words of Herry Monster, two heads are better than one. Here’s why and how…
Most people know what bookmarking is: sometime in early June, you come across an obscure, but really, really useful website, which you decide you’re definitely going to use for a unit in November. However, over the long break, your brain is left idle for so long it’s wiped clean and you no longer remember where or how you found the site. The obvious solution you should be thinking of now is to always add useful websites to your collection of bookmarks or favorites in your web browser, so you have a link to them handy for when you need it.
But what if you’re not at school when you’re writing the lesson plan? With the old way of bookmarking, they stay in your browser on the machine where you bookmarked it. Some of you will (hopefully) now exclaim: Google Bookmarks! Good answer! Yes, Google Bookmarks takes care of the accessibility from anywhere, but we still don’t have the powerful social aspect I’m talking about…
What if anyone else could also access your bookmarks, e.g. the other teachers in your department, or your students, for example? What if you could access each others’ bookmarks and actually form a kind of online curricular research team? Well, with social bookmarking you can!
Here’s a video that illustrates it much better than I can explain it, using the website del.icio.us:
Get it?
Now, how can you and your colleagues or you and your students use this?
If you decide on a tag you’re all going to use for a particular purpose, e.g. finding useful resources for a particular course or even a particular unit or topic, you can then search the del.icio.us site for all instances of websites with that tag, or you can subscribe to del.icio.us bookmarks that include that tag, and every time a new site with this tag is added to any del.icio.us account in the world, it’ll appear in your subscription. (You or anyone else can also subscribe to your del.icio.us account in an RSS reader, e.g. iGoogle.)
Obviously, since there are millions of del.icio.us users, you’ll want to agree within the team on a rather obscure tag, to make sure that no-one else is likely to ever use it and ‘contaminate’ your pool of resources with stuff that is irrelevant to you. For example, for a unit on ‘Network Topology’, my students and I might use the tag ‘IB_Comp_Sci_Network_Topology”. To make it even more specific, we could use “ISM” as part of the tag, or even “Cheese cake”, for that matter. (Yum, delicious!)
In this way, you can turn your class or department into a coordinated research team, all scouring the web for excellent resources for your subject, and everyone in the team can then access the resources from anywhere with Internet access.
