What is social bookmarking?
- Social bookmarking is a web-based service to store and share your Internet bookmarks. As such they are accessible from everywhere.
- Social bookmarking sites today use an organizational strategy known as tagging. Tagging refers to the ability to add a short description to the website and some relevant keywords (a tag) in order to classify the website.
- Social bookmarking is highly interesting when many social bookmarking users apply similar tags or keywords for the same bookmarks: a user can then easily search for other websites that have been tagged in the same way.
- If a person has made his/her bookmarks public, you can also search through his/her bookmarks.
Social bookmarking in Higher Education: Ideas!
- For teaching staff social bookmarking can be interesting:
- to create a group of researchers or teachers with a common interest (same course, same research topic, same institute, same project) to share links
- to rate and review resources of information
- to create an "internet library"
- to unintentionally discover resources and information by following other people's similar tags.
- to setup a group tag in order to share educational resources
- For students social bookmarking can be used to:
- to create a group of students around a common research topic (a groupwork, a paper, a thesis, a project, a phd.) to share links with each other
- to rate and review resources of information (information and social skills)
- to stimulate unintened learning opportunities
- For a (research) institute social bookmarking can be powerful for:
- knowledge management: to create a collection of resources around the (research) themes of the institute. This can be done through the creation of a network of individual accounts or through a common group account. More on this topic can be found here.
How to get started?
The internet knowns quite some popular social bookmarking websites. For all services it is enough to sign up for a free account and to get started!
- Popular social bookmarking websites are Del.icio.us and Furl.
- Specialised social bookmarking services for research are Connotea and CiteULike. These websites can help academics to share, store and organise their academic papers and bookmarks they are reading.
- You can integrate the service in your web-browser (it is just plain easier).
- You can import any links you might already have on your computer.
- You can organise your tags into groups or categories. (TIP: it is good to limit your keywords to specific words that describe the links the best, rather than adding a large amount of keywords that all somehow apply).
- Delicious allows you to build a network of users on the basis of usernames (for groupwork or the creation of a network of peers).
- You can always export your bookmarks to your computer. (Furl has more options than Delicious to do this).
- An RSS feed can be found on the bottom of almost every page, so you can integrate each bookmarking account in an RSS reader.
- You can create a link roll or a tag roll to easily post your collection of links on your website (weblog, wiki, ...).
- More information: Help Del.icio.us - Help Furl
Let's try this out!
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