tagging+for+learning

=__Educational Uses for Social Bookmarking/Tagging:__=

I love buttons and so couldn’t resist downloading the Del.icio.us bookmarking button onto my browser (have only tagged one page so far…)

This following points are from the tutorial that accompanies the button and is relevant to educational use of tagging:

1. Save site found using multiple computers (home and school) to one resource. 2. Access your bookmarks anywhere you have web access. 3. Continue to access your bookmarks even when your computer crashes or you get a new computer. 4. Share web sites with your students or peers. 5. Search your bookmarks by keywords and tags. 6. Use related tags to narrow or extend your searches. 7. Display your saved web site links by category. 8. Learn about new sites from your other del.icio.us users. 9. Subscribe to other users’ del.icio.us bookmarks. 10. Check out recently posted and popular sites.

It has many educational possibilities: 1. Web sites for student research or projects 2. Books recommendations 3. Professional research 4. List of books you would like to read 5. Placing web links on your school web page 6. Students can find resources at home and access them at school and vice versa 7. Share what you are reading or view what your peers are reading on the web 8. Web site collections tagged by school topic (Ref: http://del.icio.us/DavidDMuir/)

Rebecca Hedreen a Distance Education Library Coordinator for [|Southern Connecticut State University]'s [|Buley Library], writes a very good summary of how she used social bookmarking for her studies as she completed a masters degree. Visit http://frequanq.blogspot.com/2005/02/social-bookmarking-in-education.html to check out her blog.

She used another social bookmarking services called “[|FURL]” which like del.icio.us has free registration and easy pop-up saving forms. For a good summary of Furl visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furl

She notes that “del.icio.us has a nice feature of suggesting tags, while FURL actually saves a (private) copy of the page, so you can see it even if the page disappears or changes.”

While completing her Master's of Education, she set up FURL categories for each of her classes ([|EDTC575] and [|EDTC590]) and saved research findings as she worked. The best part was that since FURL etc is completely web based, it didn't matter whether she was at home, in her office, or where ever, if she found something useful she could “FURL” it for later use.

She goes on to note that: “Groups [ie your class] can use these services for collective projects. Either a group account can be established, with the password passed around to the group or, in what is probably a safer and more useful version, a group can establish a unique tag and tag all group-related links with it. Joy Weese Moll set up [|del.icio.us/tag/sislt9409] for her Digital Libraries class. (Thanks to the [|Shifted Librarian] for this link!) This could get very interesting, since other people, outside of the class, could potentially add things as well just by using the tag. You could get people from all over the country contributing to your class reading list!” (Rebecca Hedreen, 2005)