EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
How many computers do you routinely use? Maybe only one if you're a dedicated laptop user and in that case perhaps your bookmarks (or "favorites") are always available to you. But still there are cases when you wish you could remember that cool site you'd really like to show a colleague or your brother-in-law and you don't have your laptop handy. And for the rest of us who haven't yet sold out entirely to the laptop revolution, we may routinely use at least two different computers - a desktop at work and another at home. Not to mention random computers perhaps when traveling. Then what about sharing your bookmarks with others? Or keeping them organized? Or having access to them from multiple web browsers even on the same computer?
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Doug Mills' del.icio.us home page
Welcome to the world of Social Bookmarking! With a free account at an online service such as http://del.icio.us/ or http://furl.net/ you can easily save your bookmarks online as you browse the web, tagging them with key words for easy retrieval later from any Internet-connected computer. What's more, you can share any of the bookmarks you make public and search through the bookmarks of others as well. For example, in preparation for a session I was leading at the recent Faculty Summer Institute held on our campus, I saved a number of bookmarks for relevant web pages to my del.icio.us account and gave them all the tag "fsi07." For you to see this collection of bookmarks, go to: http://del.icio.us/dmills727/fsi07. How about building a public collection of discipline-related bookmarks for the courses you teach? Your students can contribute as well by joining del.icio.us (or another social bookmarking site of your choice) and using an agreed upon tag for the course. Sound hard? Each service provides "bookmarklets," which are javascript links you can drag to your bookmark bar, so that with one click and a little bit of text entry (you want those tags there to help you stay organized) you can add bookmarks to your service as easily as adding it to your web browser, but with a lot more power.
But there's more! Not only can you have access to your bookmarks from anywhere on the Internet, organize them for easy retrieval with tags and share them with others, but you can also tap into the searching, evaluating, and tagging of everyone else using the service as well. One easy way to start in this direction is, when viewing your bookmarks with a certain tag, to click the "all" link in the gray navigation bar near the top of the page. This lets you see all bookmarks tagged with the tag (or tags) you were viewing. Scanning through this expanded list of tagged bookmarks, you have access not only to the web pages saved with this tag, but also, by clicking on the text that says "saved by x other people" you can see the comments others have written about the site as well as the "common tags" and the "posting history" for that site. The common tags may open new directions for research into the topic you're interested in - maybe you'll see something you hadn't thought of before. The posting history gives you a list of everyone else who's saved this bookmark and the tags they saved it with. Finding someone who seems to think like you might prompt you to click on their name, or one of their tags, to see what other bookmarks they've been saving that might be of interest to you. For every bookmark you view, if it's not one of yours, you'll see a "save this" link next to it that gives you a quick way to add that bookmark to your own list as well.
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of a "saved by X other people" page
In addition, if you happen to find one or more people who seem to do an excellent job of finding bookmarks that you're interested in (web search soul mates, perhaps?), you can add them to "your network" - a collection of people whose public bookmarks you can see just by clicking on the "your network" link at the top of the page. You can also share bookmarks easily with people in your network, so there's a lot of potential here for use among colleagues or in research groups, for example. Next to the "your network" link is a "subscriptions" link. Clicking that takes you to a page where you can choose to "subscribe" to specific tags in del.icio.us so that whenever a new bookmark is added with that tag, you can see it in the my subscriptions area. The subscription area further allows the refinement of subscribing to specific tags from a specific user as well.
This is not all that Social Bookmarking has to offer, but I hope you begin to get the idea that this is powerful and useful. To help you investigate this further, here's a link to everything in del.icio.us tagged "social bookmarking": http://del.icio.us/tag/social+bookmarking. Personally, I use del.icio.us because it's the service I started with, but if you're looking to get started with a Social Bookmarking service, you might also want to consider furl.net. One of the features unique to that service, as far as I know, is its ability to export your bookmarks in ALA, MLA, or other common citation formats. Enjoy!
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