Week 3- Social Bookmarking :-)

Why didn't I know about social bookmarking sooner? My life would have been so much easier as a student in college. I remember having to manually copy each website I visited ( some of which I couldn't read my own handwriting and had to omit or some sited were just incorrect). It was so frustrating and time consuming. I also bookmarked some sites which ended being a mess because there were too many bookmarks. Whenever I did research at home and went to school- I would sometimes leave my hard copy at home or whatever I bookmarked on my home computer was not accessible in college. So when I was introduced to Social Bookmarking, I was amazed.

What is social bookmarking you might ask? Well, social bookmarking provides a way for students or teachers to save all their links in one place on the internet. These links are saved with one or more tags to help find the site in the future. For example, M. Mslevy found some sites with valuable information about Technology in the classroom and tagged the links. Now, all the websites that she tagged is easily accessible by myself and my fellow classmates; not only can she share these bookmarks with her students but she can share her private collection with the entire community of others interested in Technology in the classroom. The advantage of using social bookmarking is the human collaboration involved in searching. If the teacher or student searches for information on a topic, a social bookmarking site like Delicious provides links to sites that other people also have found valuable. Sharing is what makes social bookmarking so effective. Because some bookmarking allows users to rank the site's usefulness; over time, the quality of a site may be more easily discovered by recommendations from individuals rather than depending on Google which measures the value of a site by the number of visits.

As an educational tool, Social bookmarking can help students to find ways to search for information other than through Google. Students who use social bookmarking will also be less likely to lose links that they have found important. If social bookmarking is used in the classroom, students and teachers can move from one computer to another and still have full access to their bookmarks. Students and teachers will be less likely to forget the location of the sites they have used. Students will be able to share their bookmarks with their classmates. Both students and teachers can also share collections of bookmarks they have found to be worthwhile. Social bookmarking can also help students to quickly find links to important current events and historical events or as a matter of fact any topic of interest.