Blog #3: Social Bookmarking

INTRODUCTION
When I first started working as a Teacher On Call, I had a box of teaching materials I kept in the trunk of my car. Each school, classroom, teacher, and set of students varied so much that I wanted to be prepared to face a variety of challenges. My box contained mostly print materials: books, strategies, templates, and resources that would handily fill in blank spots in the daybook. As I got more experience, I weeded these resources down to one file folder that worked for almost any grade level or subject. As I usually was listening to my iPod in the car, I started to use my iPod as a storage device to carry lesson plans and worksheet templates. This was great, until I forgot my iPod or USB cord. Or the teacher didn't leave me a password for the computer and/or printer.

Now, I work as an employment counsellor, coordinating a drop-in centre for job-seeking clients. I have bookmarked hundreds of useful job search engines, resume and cover letter resources, and research tools, but was limited in how I could share the best of these with clients. Copying and pasting links into emails or Word documents was onerous and time consuming. The process had to be repeated for each individual client, based on their unique job search situation. The other solution I came up with would be to export my bookmarks from my browser into a file that could be emailed to clients. The problems with this process were: 1.) Clients would have to know this type of resource existed, 2.) Clients would have to request the resource from myself or another counsellor, and 3.) The browser would export ALL my bookmarks, not just the relevant ones.

Enter Delicious. As the Delicious site claims, "Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet." In this interview from The Guardian with Delicious creator, Joshua Schachter, he describes how he built Delicious, "not with commercial intent, just to solve problems." Having explored Delicious this past week, I feel that Schachter understood my problems listed above, and created the site to help free me from specific device dependencies. Working on my home computer or my work computer, I can create and share public or private bookmarks.

Reflections on the process of learning about Delicious

Before learning about Delicious this week, I was bookmarking in my browser and using my Twitter account (@lisavanness) as a bookmark dumping ground. I wanted an internet place where I could keep track of my precious bookmarks and links, somewhere I could access from any computer or device with internet capability. Although I had heard the phrase "social bookmarking," I was thrown off by the social aspect. I already use social networking sites, I don't want social bookmarking too, whatever that is, I thought. How wrong, how wrong.

My computer-based bookmarks only appear in the browser window of the specific computer I created them in. By creating bookmark folders I was able to stay organized, but my organization was device dependent. Not only does Twitter require users to log in to see posts, I can only see the posted links of people I am following. Due to the limit of 140 characters, Twitter-posted links contain too little information about what the site is. Twitter information is random and unsorted, producing a near cacophony of noise. My humble pie is tasting very Delicious.

I created my account easily enough and added gadgets into my browser toolbar. At first, I didn't understand what the excitement was all about until I started exploring around and little lightbulbs started coming on. If I save my bookmarks on Delicious, I can access them anywhere with internet connectivity! I can tag sites for my own personal use in a way that makes sense to me, and organize them according to my own understandings and needs! I can keep my bookmarks public or private! I can see other people's accounts who also tagged the site, and snoop through all their public bookmarks - maybe they'll be into the same things! I can make notes about each site so that I'll remember why I found it so interesting in the first place! And my personal favourite, Delicious can help me stay more ORGANIZED - and less overwhelmed!!! Instead of feeling like I'm drowning - rather than surfing - the amount of information available on the internet, "[s]ocial bookmarking provides one way for users to get control of this information" (From Social Bookmarking, Teaching Today).    

Discussion of Delicious for my own personal learning

Once I created a personal account where I played around with public and private settings, I immediately wanted to create a Delicious page for the organization I work at to help clients with their job searches. I went asking for permission and was surprised to meet some resistance. This is such a great tool, why wouldn't we want to use it? Our website guru suggested that we want users to stay on OUR website as much as possible, and sending them off site to follow links is contrary to this goal. After a discussion on how beneficial Delicious could be for our clients, we decided to test out a Delicious page for a while and bring the resource to other staff members' attention at our next team meeting.

Creating The Skills Centre's Delicious page was much more focused than my personal explorations of the tool and I was happy to have a few 'I wonder' questions answered. When tagging, I found out that there is no distinction between plurals or capitals. Therefore, when I tagged something as "Job_Search_Engine" instead of  "job_search_engines," the bookmarked site was still sorted into the appropriate tag. I was also happy to see a spell checker wiggly red line, letting me know that I had spelled a word or tag wrong.

If a certain site has been socially bookmarked before, Delicious suggests the tags already used. This builds on the community's tags and helps to create folksonomies. Social bookmarking "represents the interests and judgements of a community of users" (from Social Bookmarking, net.educause.edu). As an employment counsellor, it was interesting to see that the two most-tagged Canadian job search engines, Eluta and Monster, were two that don't carry many listings for our small rural area and are thus not used very heavily by our clients or counsellors. So building this Delicious page of job search bookmarks specific to our client base was a very different process from what a job search assistance Delicious page would look like in a large urban centre with a very different 'community of users.'

I realize that the amount of exploring to be done on Delicious, such as looking at other users' job search tags, could take vast quantities of time. What sites are other job seekers using that we don't know about? Are there any other employment agencies using Delicious, and if so, what are they bookmarking? In the future, our organization will need to monitor:

• how much time is spent researching 
  
• what quantity of tags create a tool for our clients, and what number feel overwhelming
  
• how much spam is sent to our "jobs" email account as a result of having a public email contact listed
• expired or moved links
• how many clients and counsellors actually use the tool and if it's worth investing maintenance time into
• what other bookmarked sites would be useful for our clients
• the best place to feature our Delicious page on our website. Right now, I've placed it in our Job Search Strategies Resource section, but we might see more users if we also used a Network Badge

Even though I only used three different tags for The Skills Centre's Delicious site (job_boards, job_search_engines, and local_employers), I found myself really thinking through which bookmark went with which tag. Although I could have used multiple tags for certain sites, I felt that our clients would get frustrated with this repetition. To assign a tag, I had to hold pre-determined criteria in my mind. For example, the difference between a job board and a job search engine: both have a variety of employer listings, but job boards are limited to the information contained within their site; they do not seek or pull 'outside' information whereas search engines do. The complexity of this process reminded my of the video by Michael Wesch which examines "the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information."




Discussion of Delicious in terms of teaching and learning

Delicious can be a more powerful research tool than Google. Google is a computer program that seeks out popular sites while Delicious is built by engaged human beings who seek out relevance and meaning. In other words, social bookmarking is quality while Google is quantity. Students and teachers can take advantage of this quality to scaffold their learning and construct their own classroom values.

Before social bookmarking, students only had to be concerned about their teacher evaluating their reference list; now the list is public and available to their peers. As Donna DesRoches writes, "Research is more collaborative and students are more diligent about evaluating resources because they know their peers will be using them" (from School Library Journal). This heightened consciousness is similar to the effects of other social sites such as YouTube and FlickR when postings are public domain.

Social Bookmarking Pros:

      Independence from specific computer or gadget As long as the teacher or student has internet access, the bookmarks can be viewed, retrieved, and added to. For students, this means they can work with their bookmarks in the classroom, in the computer lab, in the school or public library, at home, even on some cell phones. This transferability helps students stay organized and collected. For teachers, this transferability means the dog will never again eat a student's homework. Teachers can quickly see where, what, and how much their students have been researching. 
      Two brains are better than one And twenty brains are fantastic! Being one person looking for information on the internet can be overwhelming and exhausting. How can one person find it all? Social bookmarking allows people to digitally join forces, search out relevant links, and share them with one another. This eliminates a lot of reproduction of effort, such as all class members bookmarking a wikipedia entry, and allows collaborative researchers to cast a wider net of potential web resources.

       You say sweet potato, I say yam   The social tagging feature allows users to explore how others have sorted and classified information. For example, I might tag a site such as cuteoverload.com with the word "procrastination" while another user might use tags such as "cute" or "animals."

Social Bookmarking Cons:

        Different folksonomies   The tags I use in my bookmarking may be different from tags someone else might use. While this has been noted as positive in social bookmarking as it allows users to see how others interpret information, it can also mean you still don't find what you're looking for. I noticed this when different resources in our weekly class trailfire were discussing how they would tag Romeo and Juliet. One would use the tags "Hamlet," "Shakespeare," and "lessonplans" while the other would use "Shakespeare," "theatre," "plays," and "Romeo_and_Juliet." The only common tag is Shakespeare. Another difference is the use of underscores and the use of combining words to create tags. For effective searching, users must experiment with a variety of tags and phrases.
       No rules   Because social bookmarking is easy to use and accessible to many people, there are no formal taxonomies. So by using a variation on a tag, I may be missing out on opportunities to connect with the information of other users who are also interested in "blooms_taxonomy" or "bloom'staxonomy." In Delicious' defense, they do suggest tags other users have assigned to previously tagged sites.
      Cheater cheater pumpkin eater   If a class assignment involves students compiling public links on social bookmarking sites, it can be difficult to know who is responsible for what. What if Sally looked at Billy's links, and appropriated them all for herself? For a class resource list, what if one student is doing all the tagging? How does the teacher know who did the actual work of searching and evaluating information? And does any of this matter? If the point of the assignment is to demonstrate the ability to compile relevant bookmarks, Sally has demonstrated that she knows where to look for useful links: Billy's Delicious page. However, if the point of the assignment is to analyse, synthesize, and evaluate resources (the higher order thinking skills suggested by Bloom's taxonomy) then both Sally and Billy will have to demonstrate their learning in their tag notes or further assignments.


SUMMARY

Information has changed from being something you had to go looking for, to something that washes over you in a digital flood. Students and teachers require tools and strategies for dealing with this deluge. Social bookmarking is a way to organize and share information, and become less dependent on any one device.