Going back to basics, but on the principle of narrating my work, here’s a short post I published today inside the firewall…
What is it?
Most people will be familiar with the idea of “bookmarks” (aka “favourites”) in a web browser – the menu option on IE, Chrome, Safari, Firefox etc. to save the site links that I use most often, or find most interesting.
Social Bookmarking tools take this idea and extend it in ways that are not only useful to me as an individual, but which also make it simple to share links with other people.
At their simplest they are a web application to which you can add links (and they mostly provide little browser plugins that mean you can do it inside your browser). Two of the best known examples are Diigo and Delicious, and each of these also allow options such as tagging, marking links as private etc.
Beyond that, different services off different features, for example Diigo provides extended capabilities to annotate and highlight web pages
Why would I want to use it?
At a personal level, keeping links in a social bookmark service means that I can:
- access my bookmarks wherever I am,
- access my bookmarks on whatever device I am using to browse the web
- use tagging to organise my bookmarks
Beyond the personal use, these tools have even more value when I work as part of a group or team:
- choosing to follow other people’s bookmarks, as a way of using their knowledge as an intelligent filter of the “firehose” of information on the web
- choosing to use specific tags for sharing information within a team
- on some platforms, forming groups (private or open) into which I can post bookmarks and comments
Social Bookmarking in a learning context
One model for thinking about how individuals can best manage and create knowledge in a networked environment is Harold Jarche‘s “Seek Sense Share” framework.
Social Bookmarking is a key part of Seeking – “finding things out and keeping up to date”. The social aspect supports the practice of finding colleagues or commentators whose judgement I trust, and who I can use as “information filters”.
