Big IDEA

Social bookmarking for educators

25 July 2005

There’s been some discussion over at incsub about whether new-ish tools lend themselves to replacing the old “linkfest” page–a list of web resources on a given topic. If I follow the thread correctly, James is not convinced that social bookmarking will work to replace linkfest pages due to no clear incentive for participation. And, can social bookmarking for this purpose survive on a grand scale, like del.icio.us, or is it better suited to the district or even school level?

Regarding incentive, I think most teachers would see the benefit of using a social bookmarking service if there are enough participants of the same grade level and discipline. The sole 5th grade science teacher has little reason to participate because he or she will not derive the benefit of exploring other sites deemed worthy of saving by other 5th grade science teachers. However, perhaps the convenience of a web-based bookmarking system with tagging features is enough to get this teacher to participate; after all, from the organization/management perspective, social bookmarking systems typically win out over traditional browser-based marks.

We might also look at narrower communities that are using social bookmarking. For instance, LinuxQuestions.org has launched a social bookmarking system. It doesn’t look like it has garnered much of a following, however. One reason could be that folks are already invested in another system like del.icio.us and don’t want to spread their marks out over multiple services. Or perhaps members of this community simply don’t recognize the benefit (or it loses in cost-benefit analysis) of the service. One has only to look at this thread on Slashdot to see that a number of these techies are downright suspicious of social bookmarking.

CommonTimes dubs itself as “a social bookmarking community for news readers.” This appears to be essentially a del.icio.us limited to news. One of the help pages describes some potential uses:

Intra-office: Employees at Acme Org. wish to share the news they feel is most important with each other.

Sector-based: Nonprofit technology consultants such as those at Circuit Riders might want to share technology news and information with members of their association.

Cause-based: Employees of organizations working for reproductive rights around the country wish to share news and information which they feel is important for their colleagues.

Research-based: Medical researchers working on stem cell issues may wish to share news and research with colleagues around the world.

Interest-based: Democratic activist readers of the blog DailyKos.com use CommonTimes to clip and share news stories before linking to them in blog entries.

News-gathering: Journalists at the Acme Tribune may want to clip and share news and information to discuss with newsroom colleagues – and to keep a trail of important stories.

It’s difficult to judge to popularity of CommonTimes. On the front page you can see that many of the headlines have been saved by only one or two people. Compare that to something like oishii, which polls the front page of del.icio.us every 5 minutes and pulls the sites saved by at least 30 people.

There is also CiteULike, which is aimed at helping academics bookmark academic papers.

I wonder if a social bookmarking service targeting educators would work? I think that it could, provided that a) users are not already heavily invested in another bookmarking system, and b) that there is some accepted tagging practice to make it useful. For example, I think there needs to be some commonly-used tagging scheme that identifies content area and grade level; beyond that, it’s an open system.