Social bookmarking is described as a social bookmarking site that allows a user (or a group of users on one account) to add meaningful labels that describe the content of Web sites (Buffington, 2008). To break this down even further I would like to offer my take on this web 2.0 tool. After reading through the Education World and Web 2.0 Wiki sites, I gathered that this tool takes bookmarks of potentially useful websites and allows users to access them from any computer around the world. These website bookmarks can be accompanied by descriptions and comments to enhance the experience. This can be useful in research environments where multiple people are looking for a specific topic. If one of those people find a good website, they can share it with the rest of the group with nothing more than a tag. A “tag” is essentially a keyword or words that tells users what the website is about at a glance.
The process is very simple and can save quite a bit of time and hassle because you can retrieve and organize your bookmarks from any computer in the world. Instead of individually saving the site in a variety of folders on your computer browser, you just type a few keywords called tags (Langston Hughes, alliteration, Black History, metaphor, rubric, and so on.), and your sites are organized automatically with sites saved by other users, using those same keywords. It really acts like the world largest bookmark-sharing database.
When students are let loose to work on projects they will eventually find websites of interest to many other students. Instead of these sites going unused by others, students would be working together to create a shared knowledge base with an online component (Buffington, 2008). When a collective knowledge can be created by something as simple as tagging a useful website, education can begin to move and grow in different directions that could potentially enhance the way students learn today.
References
Buffington, M. (2008). Creating and consuming web 2.0 in art education. Computers in the Schools, 25(3/4), 303-313. http://search.ebscohost.com
Jackson, L. (2009). Sites to see: Social bookmarking. Education World. Retrieved November 1, 2009 from http://www.education-world/com/a_tech/sites/sites080.shtm
Social Bookmarking: Link to classroom 2.0 social network discussions. (n.d.). Retrieved November 3, 2009, from CR2.0: http://wiki.classroom20.com/social+bookmarking
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment