Social bookmarking websites such as Diigo or Delicious can be thought of as a Favorites button on a computer, except they are online so one can access them from any computer. These sites can be used to search, organize, share and manage websites. Each bookmarked website can be given one or more "tags" to organize the sites into categories of information.
For example an elementary teacher might want to look up helpful math and English websites. Once found the teacher can then tag the websites which in essence puts the sites into electronic piles based on the materials tags.
Some advantages to social bookmarking include people tagging the websites based on what they found usefully instead of a machine. This leaves room for organization based on one's way of thinking and not what technology deemed important. A social bookmarking site will also record how many times a website has been bookmarked which shows if many or only a few people found a site useful.
However, there are a few disadvantages as well including the idea of no common vocabulary. An example of this might be two individuals that are both looking for websites about skateboarding. One may tag all their sites as "boarding" while the other "skateboarding" because they use different tags the two would not realize to check out each other's bookmarks. In addition, as I found, if one makes a spelling error or uses different punctuation it makes the tag different from other similar tags.
Diigo and Delicious are both essentially the same however, Diigo has one feature that Delicious currently does not. In Diigo one can highlight materials of importance on web pages to aid in the organization of materials.
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If you really get stuck with the vocabulary, you can use OR in the search to look for skateboard OR skateboarding. I also like the new ways to narrow the search where it gives you suggestions for wods that might be used to narrow the search. Spelling it another story - the tool isn't as sophisticated a Google which offers suggested spelling. I've also found that if someone adds a comma after the tag, it considers it a new tag.
ReplyDeleteThat highlighting feature of Diigo is definitely useful. One thing that you have to think about is how to teach students that just copying from the website and then pasting that information into their papers is plagiarism. It's so easy to do with Diigo.