Social Bookmarking: Finding that needle in the haystack, dropping it, and finding it again

Photo by Ken Douglas via Flickr

First Impressions 

In a virtual world of over 15 billion websites finding the information we require is becoming increasingly difficult.  After finally finding that perfect article, website or blog post how do you possibly find it again?  Information and search overload are the resulting side-effects from the constant stream of websites flashing across our screens daily.

Alright, I'll admit it.  For a fairly successful woman who is constantly on the go with many different projects and jobs I have a deep, dark secret.  From the outside I have fooled my friends, family and colleagues into thinking I effortlessly flit from the classroom to extra-curricular meetings, to my second job, to social events, to the gym, to family gatherings and class at the university; always arriving put-together and prepared.  On the surface, I have everything under control.  

The truth is, I'm a mess.  To the untrained eye, my apartment appears tidy and organized but delve a little deeper and my true nature is revealed.  My closets resemble something you may have seen on an episode of Hoarders and the trunk of my car is jam packed with things that I've been meaning to drop off here and there.  I have pairs of jeans in my closet I wore to class (in high school) and every pair of shoes purchased in the last ten years has a spot in my bedroom closet.  When I packed up my classroom in June to prepare for my leave of absence I actually labelled some boxes "resources I don't think I'll ever use again".  In a rare de-cluttering mood last week I cleaned out a drawer where I found pay stubs from when minimum wage was $5.65.  Organization of my life has always been a struggle and I'm a hopeless (yet remarkably high-functioning and effective) procrastinator.  Upon becoming a teacher nothing could have prepared me for the challenge of organizing a classroom of twenty-five second graders.  When things in my physical world got overwhelming, I have always been able to turn to my digital world where a saved file or bookmark would help me forget about the masses of unorganized papers cluttering my desktop and classroom.  But, as I started to go digital more often, something terrible began to happen.  My files were getting more and more cluttered and I began to get confused with the four USB sticks I had going.  Accessing that lesson I made last year became a formidable task and I was having difficulty remembering which computer I had bookmarked the schedule for an upcoming workshop on.  My refuge had become my worst nightmare and there was nowhere else to turn.  I was in need of a serious digital intervention, there had to be something that could help me to tame my digital data tornado.  

Enter the web 2.0 superhero solution: social bookmarking.  Diigo, Evernote and Delicious are a few of the tools that promise to turn me from a "note-monster" to a streamlined, digitally-organized rockstar.

Photo by imnicholas via Flickr

Bringing it Home

In the last couple of weeks I have been overwhelmed with the amount of websites, blogs and articles I've been accessing.  My eyes grow tired just thinking of the hours I have spent searching out information and examples for the various Web 2.0 tools I've been exploring.  At the beginning of the course, upon my professor's suggestion, I signed up for a Diigo account without knowing much about the tool.  Slowly, I began to use my Diigolet toolbar to bookmark and tag sites I wanted to return to.

As I have continued to bookmark sites and posts I realized I was building a small, searchable collection of sites that I consider useful and interesting.  Just as my Google Reader has allowed me to personalize and filter what information comes to me, Diigo has allowed me to save what I think is important for later and assign tags to the things I find.  I know that I can keep my bookmarks private or share them with various groups.  I experimented with searching out classmates and authors' bookmark libraries and found links based on interesting keywords.  I enjoyed the convenience of being able to access my bookmarks from any computer or network.


Since I had the basics of bookmarking sites on Diigo down, I thought it was time I explore the other functions of Diigo, the things that make it a truly collaborative and social web 2.0 resource.  I wanted to experiment with the highlighting and annotating features and explore the ways in which features such as this can facilitate collaboration.  Upon finding an interesting wiki on the subject of social bookmarking I played around with highlighting some interesting sentences and adding some "floating sticky notes" with my ideas and comments on the page:



Next, I shared the annotated link with my group members on eclass to invite some collaboration and discussion on the subject.  My group members could follow the link and view the website with my annotations and highlights and add to the discussion:

In this way, I uncovered a whole new level of interacting with the text I read on my computer screen.  It is easy to share and invite collaboration on things I do find.


Another site that I explored this week was Evernote.  I signed up for an account and even downloaded the application for my iPhone.  As of this writing I have only scratched the surface of Evernote's features but I can see it becoming an increasingly important tool in my personal life to organize bits of information I would like to save from the web and life as I go about my daily business.  My phone is always with me and the Evernote app allows me to type in a note, snap and tag photos or even take a voice recording.  Once I sync my phone to my laptop all my notes end up in the same place.  The portability factor is a key selling feature of Evernote for me.  

Bringing it to Work

There is no denying it: the web is changing the way we read.  We need to be preparing our students to read and organize information in their digital world now more than ever.  Social bookmarking is a way to create and encourage collaboration while a collective filing cabinet is being created and shared by the masses.  A byproduct of all this information at our fingertips is the notion of "screen ADD".  Jumping from site to site, skimming over the first bits of an article before moving on rather than prolonged, concentrated efforts on one piece.  Nicolas Carr describes this phenomenon in his article "Is Google Making Us Stupid? by saying: "once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski".  As educators, it is crucial that we teach our students the skills they need to remain active readers in this digital world and to organize the information that they deem meaningful.  After all, "of the 11.2 hours each day that the average American spends interacting with information, slightly more than 30 minutes is spent with books, magazines, or newspapers” (Ferritier, 2010).  


An article in Teaching Today outlines three reasons to use social bookmarking in the classroom: classroom management, collaboration and news gathering.  Lets look at the top two in turn:


1.) Classroom Management


This represents the most basic function of sites such as Diigo and Delicious.  The idea that your students can have bookmarks at their fingertips is appealing on so many levels.  It can help combat some technical problems and allow students to access sites at home if they happen to miss a class or need to complete homework.  As a primary teacher this is the level I see myself using social bookmarking with my students the most.  The ability to set up lists of age and reading level-appropriate research sites ahead of time can alleviate many of my stressors in the lab with grade two students.  Trailfire would be a useful site to include in this category.  Teaching in a gifted program my students are constantly working on independent study projects and the ability to tag sites I find with a student's name whom I believe would be interested is a powerful differentiation tool.  Even without each of my students each having an aggregator and RSS feeds as Richardson describes on page 95 of Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for the classroom, I could easily teach my students how to do a basic tag search in Diigo that would bring up resources tailored to their interests. 


2.) Collaboration


The next layer to explore beyond the basic functions of social bookmarking sites described above is the collaborative nature of these sites.  Tagging websites with informal keywords creates a folksonomy of resources at your fingertips.  "Social bookmarking creates a true web of resources and connections— one that is not limited to individuals and their folders but represents the interests and judgments of a community of users." (Educase: 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking).  With older elementary students lessons can be formed around finding and evaluating information sources, and adding to a collective resource bank with Diigo or Delicious.  Lessons formed around these skills can help students become more active online readers.  If they are collecting and tagging resources that are to be used by classmates, students are more likely to expend the extra effort to make sure it is of good quality.  Ferritier says "social bookmarking applications like Diigo help my classes explore interesting texts and get students reading actively. As students highlight parts of the text they find compelling and add comments in onscreen threaded discussions, they challenge the thinking of their peers and even of the author.” (2010). 

In his wiki Digitally Speaking Will Ferritier provides some dynamite resources to help make this vision into a reality in your classroom.  He outlines sets of roles for small groups to participate in.  For example the "original thinker's" job is to find and bookmark upwards of twenty sites on a research thread for his groupmates to consider.  Other members of this group would then work to filter and evaluate the sites further, acting in roles such as the "reliability cop" and "johnny opposite".  Beyond these basics, he also has a set of Shared Annotating roles, with jobs such as "Captain Cannonball" to get the discussion going and "The Author's Worst Nightmare" to play devil's advocate in the ensuing discussions.  These roles can help a teacher tap into the collaborative, social nature of the Read/Write web and encourage active reading.  This shift is profound and essential for our students to gain practice and skills in the new media world.  Johnson (as quoted in Will Richardson's Weblogged) hints at the potential of this new way of reading:

"As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world."

 

Packing Up and Moving On

"Though not as sexy, perhaps, as blogging or podcasting, social bookmarking is equally empowering to users, helping us make sense of what we find and use on the Web and, even better, enabling us to share our treasures with others.”
-Will Richardson in Taming the Beast: Social Bookmarking

 

I have to say that as I reflect upon my exploration of social bookmarking tools this quote sticks in my mind.  It seems that social bookmarking is the "granny panty" of Web 2.0 tools.  Functional, trustworthy and reliable this tool has won a spot in this girl's overcrowded closet.  Now, armed with this new knowlege, I'm off to tackle and tame three computer's worth of favourite folders...

Next stop... the adventures continue with podcasting.


References

Ferriter, W. (2010). Can't Get Kids to Read? Make It Social. Educational Leadership, 67(6), 87-88. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.