The 21st century has being promised the development of new tools for education. In the past years, specifically around 15 years ago the vision of schools full of books were the order of those times. Most of the students needed to look into books for information to accomplish their homework’s or probably visit other friend’s house to review in other books to share words. While the network start raising more options for research and material are becoming available. Now we have the options with web tools for make research, archive our findings or even share with others.
A common technique to save our search is bookmark a website or source in our computer in folders or as individual in order to have them archived. Making this process let us review or find those websites from our computer but did not provide the benefit that if we are in other computer, for example using our schools computer we are not going to be able to access the links that we have in our personal computers. In other hand, a tool that we can use to access our archived materials from other places is social bookmarking.
In an article publish by Educause (2005), describe social bookmarking as “the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and tagging them with keywords”. You can designate them as public or private for your benefit and security. Using this method, we can organize the information by topics, release dates or by categories of specific criteria’s. This can contribute in learning to teachers and students since can result in an accessible practice to search information. Is very important to use correctly this type of applications. For example, tagging correctly our bookmarks can assist others to find the information they are looking with a more accurate search. If the bookmark is not tagged properly the answers can finish with a poor view. Riddell (2006) described said that “tagging sites allow users to save their favorite links, content, and media to a centrally accessible site, similar to how you save bookmarks to your web browser”.
Other groups that can be beneficiated with social bookmarking are librarians. Like mentioned before social bookmarking can be accessed from anywhere allowing sharing our web findings. For librarians instead of archiving and storing dozens of files in a computer this tool helps them to organize more effective the material for categories. Harris (2009), said “bookmarks stored online are still a digitized version of the classic print index or directory” (p.14).
Some social bookmarking sites that can be used for students or instructors to start navigating and sharing information with peers are mentioned in the article Sites to see: Social bookmarking. Jackson (2009), mentioned some of the most popular sites for this type of sharing. An example is del.icio.us, considered by Jackson (2009) as “one of the largest social bookmarking sites”.
Since the time passes through, new tools will be develop to contribute for the benefit of education and other fields. The combination of methods used in the past with new deliverable systems is part of the 21st century trends and its technology revolution.
References:
Educause: Learning initiative (2005). Seven things you should know about … Social
Bookmarking. Retrieved on October 10, 2009 from
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf
Harris, C. (2009). What's next for social bookmarking?. School Library Journal,
Vol. 55 Issue 2, p14-14. Retrieved on October 10, 2009 from http://search.ebscohost.com
Jackson, L. (2009). Sites to see: Social bookmarking. Retrieved on October
11, 2009 from http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/sites/sites080.shtml
Riddell, R. (2006). Social bookmarking makes its mark in education. Retrieved
on October 10, 2009 from http://www.eschoolnews.com
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