Big IDEA

Social bookmarking and resource evaluation

19 July 2005

It occurred to me that we can use social bookmarking systems like Furl to help young or inexperienced writers with selecting appropriate sources.

1. student furls sites to be used for a paper
   • student justifies site selection in comments section when furling the site–for example, this site is written by a physics professor at an .edu domain
   • student uses a topic for just this purpose–maybe it’s PHY120, or sources, or whatever
2. teacher subscribes to student’s Furl topic
3. teacher reviews furled sites
4. teacher can comment on the suitability of site through Furl (my settings - subscriptions - username, filter by topic, then click Comment to send a comment on that link to the student)

I’m not aware of any other social bookmarking system that has a comment feature similar to Furl’s. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see how an instructor might use these web sites in subsequent quarters. It would not be too much trouble to generate a list of “approved” sites, or to use the bad examples for discussion.