In Encouraging Online Engagement with Social Software I discussed the motivation for the use of social software in encoraging online, student engagment in distance education. In this post, I shall consider how we might use social bookmarking.
Background
Social bookmarking tools such as Connotea and del.icio.us are web-based services that allow registered users to save references (‘bookmarks’) to electronic resources (typically) and index, or tag, these references with personally meaningful terms (i.e. keywords, or tags).
The primary social element comes from being able to inspect the bookmarks other users have saved, or resources that have been saved with a particular (set of) tag(s) across all users or by a particular user.
In addition, some services (such as Connotea) allow bookmarks to be designated as private to an individual (and as such are not publicly viewable). With the additional ability to define groups containing particularly registered users, links to certain resources can be shared just with a group. Another nice feature of Connotea is that the publication of bookmarks to a public audience can be embargoed until a certain, specified date.
A second social dimension is provided by the ability to syndicate lists of bookmarks (as associated with particular users, tags etc.) using RSS. Using an RSS-to-javascript conversion service, it is straightforward to render a list of ‘live bookmarks’ (which I have referred to elsewhere as Live Links) within an arbitrary web page.
The use of LiveLinks of various flavours is being piloted within an online academic study group we will soon be running for the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY).
Social Bookmarking – Potential Use within an Electronically Delivered Masters Course
There are several opportunities for using social bookmarking within a course that requires an online presence (even if it is only for conferencing or accessing the student desktop) that can be viewed in terms of student-use or course team use.
Examples of student use of online and social bookmarking includes:
Several academic journals and conferences focus on the development and application of expert systems. These include X, Y, Z. Using an appropriate search tool, identify three or more papers that relate to the use of expert systems in the following areas: a) medicine; b) law; c) industrial fault diagnosis.
Bookmark your references within Connotea and tag and comment on them appropriately (?50 words or so each), embargoing their publication until time T (after TMA submissions deadline).
Export three of the references and submit them in an appropriate format (?along with comments?) as your answer to this question. Note that you will draw upon these bookmarks in the next TMA.
Recalling the similarly themed question in the previous TMA, try and identify three more papers for each topic that have been bookmarked by other students on the course by looking at the records tagged with appropriate search terms. Once again, bookmark and comment on these papers for yourself within Connotea, export the bibliographic records ?and comments? and submit them as you answer, along with short references to the papers you identified in TMA 1.
Note that this form of two part question can be reused year on year in this course, or other courses, by changing the topic areas, and perhaps by explicitly stating (different) search databases year on year. Also, although the second TMA develops on from the first, students who didn’t do the first are not necessarily disadvantaged in the second. Customisation of assessment is also possible, e.g. where students may be provided with the search topic areas personally (so one may get law, medicine, industrial fault diagnosis, another may get medicine, archaeology, computer troubleshooting etc.).
Examples of CT use of bookmarks includes:
More generally, the use of an online bookmarking tool in general provides an alternative way of allowing students to use customised services such as MyOpenLibrary.