1. Social bookmarking? I’ve never heard of it!
You’ve probably heard of bookmarking – in other words, saving web pages to the ‘Favourites’ folder in your browser. This is something you’ve no doubt been doing for years. And if so, you know the frustrating feeling of trying to remember in which ‘Favourites’ folder you saved a particular web page. You may have experienced that panicky feeling ten minutes before a lesson of trying to find the fantastic phrasal verbs online quiz web page that you bookmarked in your browser last year. Only, now, you can’t remember if you saved it in your ‘Great activities’ folder, your ‘Intermediate students’ folder, your ‘Grammar’ folder, or any other of a number of ‘Favourites’ folders! And then you remember that you saved it on your computer at home, rather than your work computer, and the class now starts in two minutes …
2. I know that feeling well. How can social bookmarking help?
Social bookmarking is essentially a web-based ‘Favourites’ page. So instead of storing your favourite websites in the browser of one computer, you save them to a web page. And this means you can access that ‘Favourites’ web page from any computer or electronic device – your home computer, your laptop, your work computer, your mobile device … To be fair, you can also do this these days with some browsers. For example, with Firefox and Chrome you can choose to ‘sync’ (synchronise) your bookmarks across your devices.
3. So why social bookmarking, then?
Well, there is a social component to social bookmarking. You access your own favourites online from any computer or device, and with social bookmarking tools you can share your bookmarked websites with others, and even have others leave comments on your bookmarks. You can choose to follow other people’s bookmarks, and to make your own bookmarks public for others to see and follow. But you also have the option of making a bookmark private, if you prefer. In addition, rather than only being able to save bookmarks individually or in folders in a browser, with a social bookmarking tool you can add several ‘tags’ (keywords or labels) to your bookmarks.
Let’s go back to our phrasal verbs online quiz web page example from earlier. If I save the page in a social bookmarking tool, I can add a short paragraph reminding myself why I like this page or how I plan to use it with my students, and I can also add tags such as ‘quiz’, ‘intermediate’, ‘phrasal verbs’, ‘fun activity’, etc. So a year later, when I try to remember how I filed the site, remembering any one of these tags and typing it into the search box on my social bookmarking page will bring up that resource. This is rather like being able to file a single resource in many different places at the same time.
4. How do I set up my own social bookmarking account?
There are a number of social bookmarking tools available. Perhaps the two best known are Diigo and Delicious – both are free at present. For each of these sites, you need to set up a user account. Both Diigo and Delicious have mobile apps, so you can easily use them via a mobile device. You can also add a button to your browser toolbar which makes it easy to bookmark pages directly from your browser with just one click.
5. Is this just a tool for teachers, or could students use social bookmarking, too?
There are a number of ways to use social bookmarking tools with classes – here are just a few ideas:
Finally, if you’d like to find out more about social bookmarking, you can take a look at my own Delicious account. You’ll find plenty of resources to explore: https://delicious.com/nickyhockly.
Enjoy!
Nicky Hockly is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online teacher training and development consultancy. Her most recent books are Digital Literacies (Routledge), an e-book: Webinars: A Cookbook for Educators (the-round.com), and Going Mobile (Delta Publishing), a book on mobile learning. She maintains a blog at www.emoderationskills.com.
