Many Choices, Where to Begin?

Social Bookmarking - what does it really mean? Social = interacting with others and bookmarking = organizing resources. With multiple options, I needed to consider the best choice for my situation. According to Gooding, Web 2.0: A Vehicle for Transforming Education, there are four benefits to using social bookmarks: "finding and creating new learning communities of users based around a certain topic, sharing access to categorized resources in an efficient way, developing new insights about a topic by discovering the views and perspectives of others, and creating a range of contextual taxonomies that carry a specific meaning for a learning community". How could you not incorprate this tool into your learning environment: making connections, offering organizational skills, critically consider others' thoughts, and learning from sharing. These are all attributes that can and should be developed.

It's time to make a choice as to which direction to follow to collate and share this information. In deciding on the provider to use at my school, I considered Webnotes What's Next for Social Bookmarking? but I think it is too limiting as it is designed primarily for library use and I'd like my staff to also be able to utilize social bookmarking with their disciplines as well. I need something that is more general.

One social bookmarking program kept resurfacing - delicious. In Tags Help Make Libraries Delicious, it was succinctly stated, "social bookmarking and tagging tools help librarians bridge the gap between the library's need to offer authoritative, well-organized information and their patrons' web experience". What a great way to bring these two components together for easier referencial use. The days are gone where information only came from books. We must now turn to cyberspace for proactive assistance. Rethlefsen goes on to say that using tags " lets libraries label books in ways that make more sense to patrons than traditional subject headings." If it makes it easier by using more common terminology and it can be traced more easily - that's the answer for me.

Sources

Harris, Christopher. (2009, Feb). What's Next for Social Bookmarking? School Library Journal. New York: Feb 2009. Vol. 55, Iss. 2; pg. 14, 1 pgs. Retrieved from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6632979.html

Gooding, J.. (2008). Web 2.0: A Vehicle for Transforming Education. International Journal of Information and Communication Technology Education, 4(2), 44-53. Retrieved from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1407624951). http://login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/pqdweb?did=1407624951&Fmt=3&clientId=12301&RQT=309&VName=PQD

Rethlefsen, Melissa L.. (2007, September). Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us. Library Journal, 132(15), 26. Retrieved from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1335174171). http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6476403.html