Topic or Tool: Social Bookmarking. Another term for website ‘favourites,’ only you can organise these bookmarks and share then with colleagues or with ‘your network.’ Still not clear? Then watch this Common Craft video. PS if you have not come across Common Craft before, have a good rummage, plenty of CPD goodness here.
What does it cost? FREE. It boast more than 5.3 million users and over 180 million unique URLs saved. There are other bookmarking clones, StumbleUpon, Digg and Diigo to name but a few of the more prominent ones.
How it could be used for teaching?
Personaly, I use Delicious to keep a record of all my favouriate websites, available to me at any time from any PC with an internet connection. That in itself is very useful.
What I did not fully appreciate when I first started using Delicious, was the power of tagging and grouping bookmarks, and the subsequent benefit. I now have my websites tagged by subject and topic. Very useful.
But the real power of Delicious comes in developing a network of colleagues with shared interests. The creator of a bookmark assigns tag giving the website meaning. These bookmarks can then be shared (very easily) with colleague (simply type for: Kristianstill). Users can easily make social connections with colleagues and share their bookmarks.
Currently I subscribe to Edtechtalk, an American group of educators with great common knowledge. They dont miss much. Plus a number of personal online collaborations. I share my links with students and a few staff.
How it could be used for teaching?
Most of the teacher benefit will come from sourcing, tagging and sharing your own bookmarks. It does not take many colleagues in a network (3-4) before you will be receiving a number of websites to review.
I would really encourage you to use tags from the start, later tags become a great way to organise your bookmarks. Feel free to use any of mine.
Delicious is also a great search engine, as each page shows you the number of recommendations it has received. Its far less hit and miss than Yahoo or Google for example.
How it could be used for learning?
Apart from the fact you will have more and better web resources for your students, social bookmarking is a difficult topic to introduce. I have encouraged a few of the senior students to create their own networks. We have a group of students tagging Critical Thiking resources for an AS Level class they take outside of College, but its a challenge.
At Hamble College we do not have roaming profiles, so we use Delicious to evidence our bookmarking skills (even though Delicious can do so much more.) It is also a good way to share websites with students. Just point them to your Deliciious links.
Its a great way to show the power of collaboration, although the lower end of 11-16 education market may find using social bookmarking a challenge. Give the students a simple topic to research, save and share the bookmarks via Delicious.
It would be great to receive links from you, add me (Kristianstill) to your Network.