Wk11 - Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking can be used in an educational context for online and distance learners who are working on a shared project. A social bookmarking site such as del.ici.ous can host URL references for the whole group to use and be accessed from their distributed locations.

I can see universities using social bookmarking as a means to conduct learning activities on how to research and reference materials for their student’s studies. For example a cohort of freshmen learners could be tasked to research a topic to find various useful references that could be used to support the academic grounding required for a shared project. Learners could be guided to rate the value and relevance of the links they find which can be reviewed by others to confirm findings. This could be a useful exercise to get students into the habit of recording and documenting useful research journals or academic papers for their studies.

From my limited experience of using del.ici.ous one of the greatest advantages of using social bookmarking is the web based login, it has enabled me to sign into my account on any computer. This is especially useful for me as studying has to fit around my busy life style on the road; at different times of the day I might access my links from my home PC, work PC or laptop and very occasionally from a shared computer terminal in other training establishments that I visit. Having my bookmarks available where ever I go is great as I am able to fit my studying in as and when I can.



The freedom to use a folksomony meta tagging system without having to stick to some metadata taxonomy means users can label tags that are relevant to themselves. As seen in my screenshot above I have used this to label some links with tags such as H807 ECA. Other students studying this course are able to search the meta tags using same data to find what some else has identified as a useful link for this course.