questions about social bookmarking
Posted February 7th, 2008 by illya
You’ve all been blogging and sharing on smielt. How does social bookmarking differ in the way we share? What roles do tags play in socializing? And how do you find information?
What bookmarking tools do you have experience with?
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I started out using Furl, and I really liked it. Then I opened a del.icio.us account. Since most people seem to use it, it seemed like a better one to stick with.
I never really thought about social bookmarking as socializing before. It is definitely a way to share information, and since you can subscribe to a person’s del.icio.us feed, there is a kind of community. But I am not sure I see socializing. What am I missing?
Yes! I find I bookmark a lot of stuff but seldom get back to really read it. I guess there is value in it for me anyway. And who knows? I might someday get ambitious and reread all the things I have bookmarked for later reference!
I do find it useful when I am researching a topic, though. That is how I would get students to use it, I think. I haven’t done it yet, though.
Nancy
I feel exactly the same way as Nancy. Like her, I started to use Furl, then switched to del.icio.us because everyone was using it. I’m amazed by it, but I not using it’s full social potential. I know it’s there but there’s so much out there to learn about that there is not enough time for everythng.
I agree with you about the time issues, but I have found that once the initial barriers of using social bookmarking accounts have been overcome then delicious or furl lists can be real time savers.
Firstly for actually sharing a set of links efficiently, over a period of time and secondly for finding what like-minded people are discovering.
Tags play a huge role in this process, and I would argue that as educators/ICT users we need to pick up a whole new skillset. Labelling, bundling, describing etc… effectively becomes essential.
Valentina
"I never really thought about social bookmarking as socializing before.
It is definitely a way to share information, and since you can
subscribe to a person’s del.icio.us feed, there is a kind of community.
But I am not sure I see socializing. What am I missing?"
I would agree with you; there is a community and because most of your delicious friends are probably teachers, you can find useful links that they have bookmarked. I use it for search/reserach/personalized library purposes only. I am happy I have a lot of fans though :) I wouldn’t say we socialize though.
How would you use delicious with your students? To what purposes? Language learning? Research?
Other skills/purposes? I am just thinking about how often I use YorkU library vs. delicious, and I think delicious is the winner here. Why?
Tags, tags, tags. Good point, Valentina. Tagging is a skill in itself and I think it needs a bit of exploration here.
I have a problem with tagging because:
I am not sure which tags are the most appropriate.
I am not sure how many tags I should assign (too many/too few).
I forget my tags and add new ones that are similar (e.g., podcast vs. podcasting) and end up with too many similar tags.
I am not sure how to tag people? According to what they do, what they stand for, or last names?
Sometimes, I lump many things into the Web 2.0 category. It seems to be a rather popular key term nowadays. What constitutes Web 2.0 and what doesn’t.
In other words, what is the secret of tagging? How do we teach tagging in language classes? And why?
Leo Lashi from China posted these questions to the TALO list as he would like to do a cross culture comparative study on this topic. You can answer him here or directly to TALO.
1 - when did you begin to use delicious ?
2 - how did you find out this tool ?
3 - how often do you use this ?
4 - if you were asked to recommend this tool to your co-worker how would you do that ?
5 - how would you organise your delicious ?
6 - do you often just store things in your delicious but seldom come back to read ?
7 - what are the disavantage of using delicious?
Like all social tools, del.icio.us relies on tagging and this is what brings topics, pictures and people together. However, although it is a social bookmarking tool, it does not provide socializing through conversations with people but through interesting content. By sharing your account with others and adding them to your network, you no longer need to compile lists or mention the link to a person through email - you just add it to that person’s delicious, who in turn may (or not) add it to their own list.
By looking at other people’s list you also get a profile of what the other people are searching for or find important for them. It’s like looking at the contents of someone’s trolley in the supermarket and imagining what kind of life these people lead or the kind of food and dishes they are going to prepare.
One idea to introduce it to learners as a conversation topic is to ask them to find two or three profiles through tags of their interest and ask them to imagine what each person behind that profile is interested in or does and would have to justify it taking into account the link list. It is an activity which contains searching, filtering through tags, observing, comparing and contrasting, analysing, synthetizing and drawing hypothesis. Bloom’s taxonomy in practice.