EXPLORING SOCIAL BOOKMARKS

If exploring video-sharing was a jungle, the exploration of social bookmarking felt like a long, hard trek through the desert. It felt like it would never end, and I kept hoping I had found exactly what I was looking for only only to learn it was a mirage!

When I began looking for social bookmarking sites, I began with the idea that it would be one-stop shopping. I thought that I could have absolutely everything on one page. What I wanted was one page that showed links to all my tools including my blogs, blogs I follow, Twitter, Facebook, Nings, and a record of the web pages I had bookmarked in with annotations for quick recall. I wanted something to keep me from being overloaded. What I've since found out is that while there are pages that can do a lot of that (iGoogle), there is not one page that can do it all. In fact, much of managing that overload lies with me as I learned in an called "Information Overload" which was linked to our Diigo site by my classmate Cindy. Obviously, my expectations came from a faulty understanding of exactly what a social bookmarking site was and what it could do.

Reflection on the Process of Learning about the Tool

First, when I began this project, I did not even know what social bookmarking was! I guess that says a lot about my level of technological savvy! Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as "... a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy." This definition was, surprisingly, not that helpful at clearing things up for me.

Early in my journey, I came across a blog by Kevin van Zonneveld that provided a list of social bookmarking sites. This was written in 2007, so it is quite certain that the list is not complete; however, it served two purposes for me. One was to show me just how many social bookmarking sites were available (and make me wonder where in the universe I had been) and the other was to provide some quick links to other social bookmarking sites I could try.

From the list I randomly chose a few social bookmarking sites to visit including: Furl, Fark, StumbleUpon, Connotea. Furl was a mirage. A lot of mention of it in various searches, but it was bought out by the company that runs Diigo, so it no longer exists. According to Wikipedia, Furl did what other social bookmarks do by allowing users to share and save web pages as well as annotate them and mark them with keywords, but it's one most desireable feature was to archive the web page, so if the page disappeared from the web, it was still accessible through Furl (something Diigo does now).

Fark is a mirage also, but of a different sort. You think you're getting something useful, but it turns out to be only in your head. Fark is a nonsense site. Members can submit links to "news stories" that aren't really news stories at all. It has a small membership fee ($5/month) which would allow you to receieve all the links in real time (1800-2000/day). Considering I'm trying to learn to manage information overload and be purposeful in my choice of information and technology, this put Fark out of the realm of anything I would consider.

Connotea was not eye catching, but it appears to do the job. It was super easy to sign up for though as it did not request the lengthy contact information that other sites do which made me like it. It does all of the basics, but nothing seemingly special that I could see. You can bookmark sites, share them, annotate them, and tag them. You can search other people's libraries to find links you like, and there is no storage limit.

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site I had read about and thought had potential to be everything I was looking for. To back up a bit though, the site uses a thumbs up/thumbs down approach to rate sites. It collects quality sites and connects fellow "stumblers" to sites matching their preferences and interests.The more you rate sites, the more the site gets to know your preferences, and the more personalized it becomes. It has an easy search bar and across the top of the page is a list of topics to look around in and contains web pages, videos, blogs, and photos. Unfortunately, I was turned off this site pretty quickly when I tried to watch a video and was presented with an ad first. But also, it appeared to me to be more for entertainment and personal interest than professional interest.

Well, after all that wandering, I developed a powerful thirst, and YouTube came to my rescue. I found a quick and easy video about social bookmarking. It explained social bookmarking using De-licio-us, and made it all look remarkbly easy.



This helped a lot in terms of understanding how it worked and what it did. My next stop was De.licio.us to actually try a few things for myself. Navigating De.licio.us is quite simple. It has three simple tabs across the top allowing the user to quickly access the newest (fresh) bookmarks, the most popular and to explore tags. I found the explore tags the handiest. I could just put in a topic and come up with a list of tags. The descriptions underneath the links make it quick and easy to decide if you want to actually link in. A friend of mine told me that she likes De.licio.us best for sharing information. She said it was very easy to create a list of links to share with people and send off the whole list. In his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Will Richardson concurs. He states, "Whereas Diigo is about saving content, Del.icio.us is about sharing links in as easy a way as possible (96). And it is easy. As Richardson explains, you can search by tags, and you can create a URL for Google Reader with http://de.licio.us/rss/tag/tag-you-want-here, and it will send you everything with that tag (p 96). As he notes, "...you could do this without ever visiting the site" (p 96). I might have continued to pursue this particular site were it not for the research of a classmate who told me that Diigo had some excellent features that made it the oasis in the vast desert of social bookmarking.

I have only been using Diigo for just under a week and already I like it. It wasn't that I didn't have some trouble figuring some of the tools out though. I signed up for a Diigo account after my classmate said it would be a good place for our group to share research and discuss our topics. And she was right. Diigo, the oasis of social bookmarking, can do so much.

First, I signed up for Diigo and uploaded the toolbar. Everytime I log on, my Diigo toolbar is there. Everytime I find a web page I want to keep, I simply click the Bookmark button on my toolbar. It saves the URL and the title. It allows me to write an annotation of the site, tag it, add it to a list and/or to a group. This all takes seconds.

My Diigo page is organized with a listing of web sites I have selected. I had three choices for how I wished this page to appear, but my favourite was easily the third choice which is "Best for edit and manage." It has tabs across the top called "More Actions," "Share to Group," and "Add to List." As well, I can easily show the annotations I have made with the click of a button on the top bar as well. This puts everything at easy access for me. Along the right I can find "My Tags," "My Lists," and an easy "Add a Bookmark" button.

The only thing I really had trouble with was figuring out how to edit a tag. I would click on the box next to the web page, click on a tab, and click under "More Actions" to choose "Revise tags." I kept getting a box that said "Revise tags," had a white space that looked like I was supposed to write in it, and it had "Submit" and "Cancel" buttons. Everytime I tried to write in that little box, it wouldn't let me. After much frustration, I came to realize that after each annotation in my list, there were buttons called "Snapshot," "Edit," "Delete," "Share," and "Preview." A press of the edit button brought up my initial annotation with a list of the tags, and I could easily go in and make any changes I wanted. The best thing about Diigo, and the feature that endeared it to my classmate, is the ability to read a web page, highlight (in different colours) and write sticky notes with questions, comments, reflections, and anything else you thought of. It's easy to see the annotations after as they are each marked with a number. A click on the number reveals all the annotations at that location. The only tricky part for me, and I believe it was my computer that caused it, was that sometimes when I highlighted a passage and wanted to annotate, I couldn't get the annotate on as my cursor kept jumping around. To illustrate how quickly it works at hooking you up, within minutes of my list of sites going up, I could, depending on the site, access as many as 21 other people who had tagged something similarly. I expect that as I get a better handle on the whole tagging folksonomy, I will be able to produce better tags and access more like information.

Social Bookmarking and my Personal Learning

I have compared Social Bookmarking to a desert as I felt I was wandering, lost for so long, and I could not see anything real, as in really useful to me. In actuality, it was probably my knowledge base that was more like a desert, lonely and empty. I started from zero on this topic. Had no real knowledge of even what it was much less how it worked, so my personal learning on this journey has been steep.

Doing research for my discussion and for this posting, I really used the Diigo site and am now enthralled. Although I haven't had time to search for topics of personal interest, I know what social bookmarking is, and why it is such a helpful tool. One of the biggest benefits being that when I am on different computers, I can access any of the sites I have bookmarked.

Another major benefit became apparent in doing research. I was having trouble finding some of the research I was looking for. I happened to be on Donna Desroches' site, who I know as the President of the Saskatchewan School Library Association and Teacher-Librarian extraordinaire, and I found the links to her bookmarks, so I searched social bookmarking and found a couple of articles that gave me some of the information I was looking for. Being able to access the research of others is quite a priceless feature. It saves time, and if you know the person is an expert in the field, the sites marked are most likely relevant and of quality. As Will Richardson states in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms "It's like having someone do the research for you" (p 94). As Richarson explains, Diigo offers unlimited opportunities to find just what you're looking for. When you save somethign with a particular tag, you can see how many others have saved the same site, you can search those persons' sites, and you can even subscribe to an RSS feed for particular tags "...and get anything anyone in the Diigo universe saves with that tag (p 95).

Tagging was another concept I really did not understand prior to this assignment. As I noted earlier, it's an important concept for social bookmarking. In my reading, I often saw the word "folksonomy" and did not really understand what it meant either. In Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Will Richardson explains that "...in working with your community of researchers, new tagging systems will emrge and become accepted that will allow all to participate in this [organizing information] process" (p 90). So instead of a system created by professionals in the field, everyday users of the web will create "folksonomies" and patterns will eventually be created that will become acceptable and understood by everyone (p 90). This really shows how interactive and creative the read/write web is.

Social Bookmarking, Teaching and Learning

The impact of of social bookmarking on my teaching, learning and work in the library is going to be big! I was very excited when I read "All Together Now" an article by Donna Derosches written for School Library Journal. She spoke specifically about how she had used social bookmarking to create a list of websites for an assignment which students could access using the tags they had been given. Students were also encouraged to add to their list. What a wonderful way for students to contribute to learning. It is authentic. She also notes that she uses it in the library. "Teachers and students use the tool to tag interesting reviews to recommend books and DVDs for the library. " This appeals to me as it is a collaborative and engaging way to involve everybody in the school library.

On his blog "weblog-ed: learning with the read/write web" Will Richardson writes in an entry entitled 'New Reading, New Writing' that "The idea that I can not just annotate a paragraph or a sentence or one idea on a webpage but that I can engage with others in sharing our thinking about that particular sentence or idea is at once powerful and daunting. I mean, imagine the meta conversations we might be able to have over different passages in the classics once they all get scanned and put online by Google (or someone else.)" Imagine the possible uses in the classroom. I often teach students about writing a literary critique, but I think it would be so much more exciting to have access to the writing, and have students think and write critically online. They would be able to build from each other's ideas and carry on meaningful dialogue about what they are reading. Powerful!

I recently put together my first library website, and one of the things I have been trying to get up and running are Pathfinders for a few of the research topics that seem to occur each year. I know that Pathfinders are different as they include links to books, database information, etc., but it sure would be great to be able to bookmark sites and tag them with a unique tag, so that students could quickly access their topic to find web-based information. I know for a fact that in the past two years I have searched for information on the same topics, passed it on to a student and then done the same for someone else in the next semester. Certainly introducing students and staff to social bookmarking would be much more efficient. Although, it is interesting that on a Teachers Teaching Teachers Podcast (#166 09-02-09) Joyce Valenza remarked that she was beginning to notice "...that those students who have been introduced to social bookmarking in Delicious and Diigo are becoming less likely to use the library databases." I certainly would not want to see students give up databases for social bookmarking, but according to an article entitled "Tags Help Make Libraries De.licio.us" by Melissa L. Rethlefson for School Library Journal, it could be the ease with which social bookmarking can be done. This, then, will be another important consideration for teacher-librarians; we must ensure that while social bookmarking finds its place, students continue to understand the importance of databases.

Personally, I began my exploration of social bookmarking feeling like I was wandering, parched, in the dry desert. Not that there weren't social bookmarking sites in abundance, but many were more like a mirage of the real thing than what I was really after. Am I out of the desert? No, but at least I have a camel to ride!