Getting Social

Social bookmarking—it sounds like some sort of friendly numbers racket, but the odds of winning with social bookmarking are much better than betting on the lottery. Everyone who uses a web browser has a list of bookmarks (Favorites in Internet Explorer parlance). These are the URLs (uniform resource locators; i.e. web addresses) of websites that you've visited and want to save for future access. It's sort of a name-and-address book of websites. Normally, this list of bookmarks resides on your computer. Move to a different computer; lose access to your bookmarks.

Social bookmarking software solves that problem by putting your bookmarks on the web, so you can access them from any computer. You get an account that allows you to add and organize your bookmarks. That's already pretty good; that's the "bookmarking" part. But it's the "social" part that shifts the concept into higher gear. Not only can you add to, change, and access your bookmarks, but others can see them too (unless you choose to make them private). And, more to the point, you can see theirs.

The real power, though, is that you can organize your bookmarks by keyword (sometimes called "tags," or "labels"). The tags are like the keywords that librarians use to catalog books. But whereas librarians work from a fixed, clearly organized, hierarchical arrangement (that takes a lot of time to learn,) you can create your own tags, on the fly, and apply them to your bookmarks. This may sound a bit like anarchy-on-the-Internet. And it is, but the trade-off is that everyone instantly becomes a librarian. Collective wisdom isn't always 100% accurate, but it's fast.

Now suppose, for example, you've got a list of bookmarks all related to Apple's iPod. As you save them with the social bookmarking software (I'll get to some specific programs in a moment), you tag each one with "iPod". If I google "iPod", I'll get 245 million hits (really). But they're not necessarily ranked in an order than makes sense. At least not to me. But if I search all of the bookmarks that others have tagged with "iPod", I can get a list of what other people think is important about the iPod rather than what Google thinks is important. Plus I can see how many people have saved that URL and maybe a brief description of the website. All for free.

It's not a perfect system as you may have already figured out. If I call it an "iPod" and you call it an "MP3 Player", we won't see each other's bookmarks because we've used different tags. That's where a librarian's years of training and experience would come in handy. But I can't wait for that, so I'm willing to live with an imperfect but fast system. Anyway, if it looks like a duck and squawks like a duck, most people will call it a duck rather than a goose.

There are several excellent social bookmarking services. Two of the most popular are del.icio.us and Furl. I like del.icio.us because the interface is so clean and straightforward. Plus the online help is well organized. My tenth graders were able to figure it out in no time. Furl has its champions, some differences, and advantages (One of which is that you can export your bookmarks to MLA format. That can be advantageous when students are doing a research project).

Try them both and pick one. It's like religion—there's more than one way to get to heaven. All of the services are free. You can get an account in a couple of minutes and be up and running immediately thereafter. If you're paranoid that a service might go under (del.icio.us is now owned by Yahoo, so it's not likely to happen any time soon), you can export all of your bookmarks to your computer to save for future business disasters.

Here are two ways that I've used del.icio.us in the classroom. First have every student get a del.icio.us account and agree on a standard naming convention for the logins. Our school's initials are "CIC", so every student's login is in the format "cicFirstNameLastInitial. For example, John Doe's login would be "CICjohnd". The "CIC" in the front just about guarantees that no one has used that ID before. An additional advantage is that you and every other student can see who saved a particular link (because everyone knows everyone else's name.)

Now suppose you've got a topic that you want your 10th grade history class to research. Let's say it's "human rights in the British colonies in the 19th century." Student conduct their research on the web, maybe in class or as a homework assignment. When they find a website that's appropriate, they save the link to their own del.icio.us account, but they assign as one of the tags as "cic10hrbrit". Again the "cic10" makes in unlikely to have been used before by someone (unlike "iPod" or "duck".) They can add other tags that might be appropriate as well, say, "colonialism".

Now that the students have done the research and tagged their sites, everyone can search del.icio.us for the tag "cic10hrbrit". The individual contributions (and research) of each student are now available to the whole class. Continue with the project as you wish—write a paper, make a presentation. As the teacher, you can search del.icio.us for that same tag and see the logins of each of the students. This helps you evaluate the quality of their work. No doubt some took the top three Google hits while others really checked out the contents. Because del.icio.us also allows you to put a comment on links you save, you can also ask students to write those comments. Now you've got more information with which to evaluate their work.

As the teacher you can join in to the research process too making it a real group effort. If you find a site that's appropriate to the topic, just tag it with the previously agreed up tag. The students will be able to see the links that you think are relevant.

There are other applications of social bookmarking software, but I'll stop here. Try this one and see how easy it is to use. Then go to the help section of del.icio.us (or Furl or whatever you've chosen to use) and explore other possibilities. Try searching del.icio.us for the tag "del.icio.us", and you'll find blogs and other sites that describe creative ways that others have found for social bookmarking software.

Social bookmarking software is another great application in which the technology quickly disappears, so that you and your students can get on with your work.

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