Week 3

Social Bookmarking is the act of saving links to various online resources to a single, user-created web page and then sorting those links through various tags created by the user. These links can then be accessed by the user from any location with Internet access. Additionally, the links can be accessed by other users. This open access amongst multiple users can be thought of as a Community of Resources.

As a student, Social Bookmarking holds several advantages. First, reserach can easily be done from several locations, such as at home, at a library or at a computer lab. Because these links are stored online, they can easily be accessed from all three of these locations streamlining the effort to seek and find online resources. Next, students in a study group or a class working on the same project together can easily share the resources the have individually found with their classmates since the links saved to a Social Bookmarking site, such as del.icio.us, BlinkList or Simpy, are online and accessable by anyone. Also, because these links can be accessed by anyone, the student is capable of receiving real-time support from educators checking on their progress. And finally, because saved links are sorted by tags created by the user, in this case the student, the information can be easily organized to streamline the creation of the final project.

For educators, Social Bookmarking allows teachers to easily share resources they have found and utilized in their classrooms, such as online lesson plans, sites with information that may reinforce an existing lesson plan or online, educational games. In this way, teachers can communicate to each other what things are working for them since teaching contains an element of stealing ideas from one another. Additonally, information teachers find that might be of use to their students can be placed in an online Social Bookmarking site, tagged together for a particular lesson and shared with the students without the need to print anything out. This element of conversation can go both ways. Students can share what they have found online with their teacher and receive feedback as to whether the student is on the right trail to finding the appropriate information.

While an added benefit of Social Bookmarking is that it encourages students to unwittingly become responsible netizens by engaging them in the folksonomy of tagging, a strong argument could also be made that Social Bookmarking may be the most important tool of Web 2.0 in streamlining the education process. Like Google Docs, a real-time conversation can be held between educators and educators, students and students and educators and students, thus improving and speeding up the flow of information within a class.