Social bookmarking

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Definitions

  • Bookmarking in the context of ICT means to save a link in some place (e.g. the bookmarks manager of a web browser) and optionally add metadata (keywords, description, title, ..).

There are several forms of shared (or social) bookmarking:

(1) Social bookmarking is a web based service, where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed. Social bookmarking sites generally organize their content using tags. Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags.” (Wikipedia)

Social bookmarking is a kind of social software that can be associated with Web 2.0 and that uses some kind of folksonomic tagging system.

(2) On the opposite, Links managers (e.g. directories like DMOZ) is a kind of social software that is associated with pre-web 2.0. The taxonomy is made by the system administrateors and users just add links. Of course, one could imagine that users were also given permission to add categories.

(3) There are some more individual bookmarking tools that allow some form of sharing or exporting.

(4) Specialized tools exist for very specific kinds of links.

(5) Combined tools, e.g. that allow notetaking, share digitial artifacts like web publications, etc.

Social bookmarking vs. Links managers

  • Social bookmarking is faster, but messier
  • Links managers are more organized, but suffer from hierarchical browsing. Better sites like DMOZ or Yahoo provide at least aliases that allow to put subcategories within several categories. This is not the case with simple systems, e.g. the links manager of PostNuke.

In educational websites, it is probably best to use link managers:

  • if you wish to to provide clear and stable links hierarchy
  • if you have to order resources for well defined subject areas
  • if most entries are teacher made (who carefully selects them)

It is probably a better idea to use folksonomies:

  • if you ask students to collect loads of links
  • if you have a hard time figuring out where to "put things".

A compromise is to agree on a set of terms (e.g. on a wiki page)

See also: the discussion in tagging.

Educational Usage

Social bookmarking software like del.icio.us can be used to have students create shared repositories of knowledge.

Educational Usage in Language Learning

Social bookmarking is a very interesting tool because you can not only discover online materials but also tag and above all share your resources with everybody on the Net. It might be used for searching for whatever you are interested in also in language learning by typing tags that describe what kind of online materials you are looking for, however it is not a search engine because you find resources that are marked by other users. You tag, you search, you share.

There’s no interaction when you use a normal search engine such as Google or Yahoo instead in this way you find materials that are suggested by people not by a machine for this reason it might be more meaningful and in parallel you create your own group of online materials you consider useful.

Social bookmarking “becomes social when tagging is added to functionality. This means that when users add a bookmark to their list. they also add a tag ( a keyword) to that link. This means that users can search other people’s bookmarks through tags defined by users.

The most important advantage of social bookmarking in education is that it “simplifies the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers and other resources among peers or students”.

Obviously it is useful also for learning a foreign language because by typing e.g. English, or English learning, vocabulary, dictionary, reading, etc. you can discover a huge quantity of websites about this topic but also by tagging those materials you find meaningful you can share them with web users or with your network that might be your classmates’ group.


Examples

  • Del.icio.us (Wikipedia entry) is today's most popular social bookmarking site.
  • DMoz is the best Yahoo-like directory project.

Links

References

Références