Social Bookmarking

Definition:

Social bookmarking is a way for people to organize, search and share links. Unlike private bookmarks, social bookmarking allows you to see other people's sites. You can also get a list of whom else has bookmarked the same site and then subscribe to people's lists you find interesting. Your archives are available on the web.
See Wikipedia's definition

Tools:

As the purpose of social bookmarking is sharing, these applications live on line.
For a list of tools

How to:

For both Diigo and Delicious, there are tools to add to your browser so you can bookmark easily.

Once the window opens to tag the resource, add keywords. It is a good idea to add text to elaborate on the tags so when you go back to the bookmark at a later date you will remember why you bookmarked it.
Tag with as many words as you want. That way you will find a resource that is relevant to more than one key word (e.g. Internet-safety and cyberbullying)
You can share bookmarks with specific people by adding : and the person's id (on delicious).
With Diigo, you can highlight selections of text, write notes and create groups of users with whom to share. There is also an education version.

For more information on how to use social bookmarking:

	Video on DailyMotion by the European Resource Centre about using Delicious
	Help Center from Diigo with videos
	Lee Kolbert explains social bookmarking to Lee Keller and demonstrates a site that takes it to the next level, www.diigo.com. Watch this series on social bookmarking and learn how to take your bookmarks with you and share with friends

Pedagogical uses:
learn_idea

Are students working in a group on a project?

They can decide on the tags they want to use and easily share sites.
The teacher can also share as well as check on the sites being tagged.
Students can easily go back to sites and reread or properly cite them for bibliographic purposes.
If you use a unique tag e.g. msvang-science3 it is unlikely another person will be using the same tag. A search for items with the tag will bring up all the items bookmarked by the research group and the teacher.

"Hire researchers"

Sites that are tagged are available to anyone (unless people designate their resources as private).
You can search delicious or diigo for a specific tag and find resources that others have thought to be valuable.
You can see how many people have tagged particular resources which may indicate the value of a resource.
You can subscribe to a particular tag so sites with that tag automatically come to you.

You can create an rss feed of bookmarks on a particular topic so that students can easily have access to them. At the bottom of this page you will see items that have been tagged in the learnrecit delicious account with the tag: social-bookmarking.

Collaboration in the community:
collab3

Colleagues can share bookmarks easily.
With diigo you can create groups and have emails come to you with the latest items that have been tagged in the group. This can make group research easier.
You can follow users and see what they are bookmarking (and they can follow you).

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