OUseful Info

Social Bookmarking and Infoskills Development (with a 'hmmm' about transient resources...)

Over the last couple of days, I've come to realise that a lot of my thinking is based around "lists" - as with the Education 2.0 Business Models list of web 2.0 business models as vaguely applied to elearning... (Thinking of list brought High Fidelity to mind for a minute, there... ;-)

Not quite as a sophisticated as using a periodic table like structures to identify gaps and make predictions about what might fill those gaps, I still find that a good enumerated list can sometimes help you identify 'missing bits' or clusters in the list items...

Anyway here's an oldie that I posted as a comment on Alan's blog some time ago (Introducing students to social bookmarking), but which I figure may be of interest to some... It's a bit too short for gaps or clusters, but I was desperate to find something I could pull a quick and contrived post around...

So in true self-plagiaristic style...

Social Bookmarking - what is it good for (in an info skills development sense)?

1. develop ability to find, tag and describe/short summarise resources;


2. develop ability to rate/identify RELEVANT, high quality resources for a particular task;


3. develop ability to use a social network to aid your own discovery process (follow/copy other peoples' bookmarks)

If anyone out there is 'teaching' the use of social bookmarking as a PLE component in an HE setting, please add a comment back to Alan's post... it'd be good to see what other people's take is on how to communicate this stuff to our students...

(Hmm...if social bookmarking is so useful, how come the kids haven't got into it virally through their social discovery/cool stuff sharing networks anyway...? Maybe it's only us 'oldies' who need to bookmark things, write down lists and feel the need to rediscover (or ensure we will be able to rediscover) stuff at some future date? Maybe the kids are happy with transient, disposable resources, confident that they can always 'get another' or use Google to turn up something related, good enough or maybe even better..? Maybe this is one of the side effects of open access to content and resources, compared to the gatekeepered fonts of knowledge that universities used(?!) to peddle access to?)

Tags: socialbookmarking, resource transience, transient resources

Posted by ajh59 at May 28, 2008 07:13 PM