What a del.icio.us treat!

I used to bookmark my favourite or useful websites on my computer at school OR on my computer at home. Inevitably, I would be working on one computer and need a bookmark from the other! It was incredibly frustrating.

Then, a few years ago, I attended an EARCOS conference where I learned about bookmarking sites del.icio.us and diigo. I was thrilled! At last, I could have all of my bookmarked sites in one place! I tried both of them and found that del.icio.us/delicious was somewhat easier and more intuitive to use so I decided to work with that site. It took a bit of work to transfer my myriad of existing bookmarks from two computers to delicious, but once done, it has been so fantastic to access my bookmarked sites from anywhere! I am so happy that this tool makes my personal life easier. I avidly share this site with others who have experienced the same problem.

I never really considered the implications of how a social bookmarking site could be used in schools until recently. During the past year, several grades have been working on different topics such as Ancient Egypt, Inventors and the Middle Ages. Part of my role as teacher librarian in the research process was to find some acceptable and age appropriate web sites for students to explore. These were posted on a wiki to which all students had read access. Of course, teachers and teacher librarians cannot locate ALL the great sites and students often find some to add to the list in their own searches. I made note of the sites and added them to the wiki, since the students didn't have write access. I now see that they could add their sites to a common delicious account on their own that would make it much easier to share with their classmates. I intend to set up specific class accounts where students and teachers can add their bookmarks and tags.

Another school application would be to use diigo instead of delicious. Although I have not thoroughly explored this tool, I see great value in being able to highlight and create notes for particular points on a site. This adds informational value to the site for anyone investigating. diigo would also be very useful for online journals, book discussions and research projects. Naslund & Giustini (2008) suggest that students "bookmark sites and highlight specific passages so that the teacher librarians can monitor their attempts at knowledge-making". I agree!

So many of the books and articles that I have been reading discuss the value of connecting with others who have similar interests, based on their tags and bookmarks. This is something that I haven't been interested in personally, but can see the value of it. When I bookmark and tag a site, I have sometimes looked at others' sites, but I don't want to invest the time investigating sites that might not be quite what I'm looking for. True, there may be some great sites that I might be missing out on, but I have to draw the line somewhere. I do, however, think it would be interesting to set aside some time for some of my classes to explore tags and others' bookmarks that might relate to their research topics and questions to see what gems we can add to our treasure house of sites.

One problem is that since we are all such individuals, we will have different meaningful tags for our sites and though many will overlap, many will not.
I primarily use delicious for my personal benefit, not necessarily for public use, so I use tags that are personally relevant and that make it easier for me to relocate my sites.

Golder & Huberman (2006) have discovered that people use seven different tag categories for web sites: who or what it is about, what it is (blog, wiki), who created it, terms to refine the description, qualities or characteristics (inspirational, funny), self reference using "my" (mystuff, myclass), and what specific task it relates to (toread, jobhunt). They conclude that there are differences amongst individuals in tagging, but that the first four categories are "extrinsic to the tagger, so one can expect significant overlap among individuals". The last three categories are more specific and relevant to the tagger and there will be less overlap.

Courtney (2007, p.98-99) also agrees that there are problems with people tagging their sites differently so that it is not necessarily clear or easy to find similar interest sites or specific information. Courtney uses the terms 'cats', 'kittens' and 'felines' as examples of similar yet different tags. Sometimes the tags are very broad or very specific, such as 'programming' or 'Javascript'.

The other side of the tagging problem is that we can each see how others have tagged sites and we might then decide to adopt each others' tags. This exchange of terms might lead to more consistency and cohesion of tags. Users would "continue to influence the ongoing evolution of folksonomies and common tags for resources" (Educause, 2005). So it may be that as we find each other through our common interests, we can close some of the tagging gaps.

If you want to see my myriad of bookmarks, here's the link....

http://delicious.com/keziahcat

References (apologies for lost formatting)

Courtney, N. (2007). Library 2.0 and beyond: Innovative technologies and tomorrow's user. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.

Educause Learning Initiative. (May, 2005). 7 things you should know about social bookmarking. Retrieved July 14, 2009 from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli7001.pdf

Golder, S. & Huberman, B.A. (2006). The Structure of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science 32(2), pp.198-208. Retrieved July 13, 2009 from ProQuest Educational Journals Database.

Naslund, J. & Guistini D. (July, 2008). Towards school library 2.0: An introduction to social software tools for teacher librarians. School Libraries Worldwide 14(2),pp.55-67(online). Retrieved July 13, 2009 from
http://asselindoiron.pbworks.com/f/14_2naslund_giustini.pdf