OUseful Info

Seven Ways of Using Social Bookmarking

A couple of weeks ago, I offered to run a workshop on social bookmarking in April next year at what used to be known in the OU as TTAA (Tracking Technology for Academic advantage).

The event has since been renamed as the Learning and Teaching Conference, which is a shame, because I'd always wanted to do something at TTAA. (For those of you who can't see that page, here's an example of the sort of thing that goes on...)

Anyway, here's what I offered to do - a 45 minute long workshop on:

Seven ways of using social bookmarks...
Social bookmarking systems are web-based services that allow users to bookmark all manner of web based resources, 'tag' those resources with meaningful keywords, and share their bookmarks with others. In this workshop, we'll look at how to use social bookmarking systems, how to discover resources bookmarked by others, and how to use RSS to pull links to bookmarked resources into arbitrary web pages. As for the rest of the 7 claimed uses? You'll just have to turn up and see.

Now, as I haven't yet managed to use social bookmarking in a course formally. (yet), but hope to try out a few things before the workshop, it's quite possible that the 7 things I can think of now will have changed by then. So I thought it would be interesting to start preparing for the workshop now (rather than the evening before the event, as is more usual;-) by jotting down some possible candidates for the 7 things...

Oh - one last thing to note before the list - the theme of the conference will be "Learning and Teaching - On the Move".

(More Than) Seven Things You Can Do With Social Bookmarking - Candidate Features

1. Save and access personal bookmarks to electronic resources via a web browser (good start, eh? "personal" bookmarks!);
2. Classify/categorise/index bookmarks with user-defined tags;
3. Share bookmarks publicly, or with members of a particular group.
4. Research - identify other users with similar interests, identify resources tagged similarly to your resources;
5. See how popular a resource is by seeing how many other people have bookmarked it (e.g. here);
6. Syndicate resource links via RSS;
7. Rapid publishing (e.g. similar to here - the main idea being you can feed description info into the page, too);
8. LiveLinks
9. Feed services such as MyOpenLibrary
10. Socialise ROUTES (e.g. along these lines).

And there was me thinking I'd run out before the seven...

PS for an institutional audience, this consideration of a Managed Social Bookmarking Environment in Higher Education may also be relevant...

Posted by ajh59 at November 7, 2005 02:47 PM