Social+Bookmarking+and+Sharing+Technologies


 * Social Bookmarking and Sharing Technologies **

Updated 5 Aug 11:

**Introduction/ Overview ** The paper will first provide readers with an overall understanding of the origins of Social Bookmarking: what it is and the ideas supporting it. Next, the paper will move onto how Social Bookmarking can be used as a tool in education. And lastly, challenges of successfully applying Social Bookmarking in education will be touched on.

**What is Social Bookmarking? ** Traditional bookmarking is done by placing a thin piece of paper or card between the pages of a book to allow the reader to return to important pages at ease. Moving forward, the Internet ages of the 1990s gave rise to a new form of bookmarking in where web addresses were stored in web browsers themselves so that users can return to the site whenever they want. Finally in the 2000s, we witness the advent of the Web 2.0 revolution, and the word “social” became the most celebrated word in the Internet world. We saw the rise of social networks, social media, social tools and of course, Social Bookmarking. These social applications were created to connect Internet users together, believing that harnessing this collective intelligence is the way forward for the development of the web.

Social bookmarking thus means that instead of saving web addresses onto the user’s personal web browser, it is instead stored on a public website and shared with the general public. The user will also be able to tag the bookmarked website with keywords so as to “organize” the bookmarks to allow other users to be able to search for it more easily. The number of “tagged” bookmarks grows with the number of users on the social bookmarking website, and this collection of bookmarks will eventually grow to form a large and well-catalogued reservoir of resources shared amongst members in the social bookmarking site. Social bookmarking is therefore a “user-directed” form of collecting, organizing and sharing information. Lastly, social bookmarking allows users to critique and comment on other users’ bookmarks, and this form of social interaction promotes social learning where users learn from each other’s expertise, experiences and thoughts.

**Social Bookmarking Ideas **

Social Bookmarking builds on several key ideas in Web 2.0: (1) Harnessing the power of the crowd; (2) Sense-making of information; and (3) Connectivity.

The strength of social bookmarking websites lies in its ability to harness the collective power of its users to aggregate a large amount of data in a relatively short time. In 2008, Del.icio.us, a popular social bookmarking website, announced that in 5 years of operation, it acquired 5.3 million members and held 180 million unique bookmarks. While this may sound impressive, it is worthwhile to note that Del.icio.us, was only ranked as the fifth most popular social bookmarking site on Jul 2011. Digg, another social bookmarking website, has around 25 million unique visitors per month, and this was close to 500% more visitors than Del.icio.us.
 * Power of Crowd **

Ranking or rating of bookmarks is another feature of some social bookmarking sites which harnesses the collective intelligence of its users to rate the quality of the bookmarks in its website. Users can reward informative or useful bookmarks with a “thumbs-up”, and bookmarks with the highest votes would be published real-time on the website to further share these information.

When there are hundreds of millions of unique bookmarks in a social bookmarking site, proper organization and cataloging is necessary to avoid the “searching a needle in a haystack” conundrum. Sense-making or organizing this huge amount of content thus becomes vital for the content in the social bookmarking websites to remain relevant, useful and retrievable. Social bookmarking websites thus came up with the ingenious idea of “tagging”. By tagging – adding descriptive keywords - to each bookmark, users create a “user-generated” content management system which catalogues each bookmark into their respective content genre. This user-controlled taxonomy is also known as folksonomy. Proper cataloging through “tagging” ensures that information remain searchable, and not be lost among a sea of other information.
 * Sense-making **

Social bookmarking websites leverage on Web 2.0’s connectivity in a few ways: First, it allows a user’s bookmarks to follow him wherever he goes. As long as there is an Internet connection, the user will be able to access his bookmarks. The social bookmarking website serves as a Cloud hard-drive where all the important bookmarks are stored; second, bookmarks can be shared with the public, and conversely, any user will have access to bookmarks of other users who list their bookmarks as “public”. Social bookmarking sites also connect users’ opinions together by allowing for comments by users on each bookmark. Users can debate and discuss issues regarding the bookmark articles to seek clarification or reinforce their understanding of the topic in question. Lastly, groups can be created in social bookmarking websites to bring together like-minded users. This effectively creates an online interest community which facilitates more focused and in-depth discussions.
 * Connectivity **

**Social Bookmarking in Education ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Social bookmarking has the ability to bring about a change in traditional, and even recent web-driven form of education. In traditional education, students rely on textbooks and publications for information, and bookmark useful content using real paper bookmarks; recently, students made use of the Internet to source for resources, albeit individually, and bookmarks these resources in their personal web browsers; however, in this current web 2.0 environment, social bookmarking allows students to have access to not only their personal bookmarks, but the huge trove of bookmarks from their peers. So if a student can accumulate 10 bookmarks every week, then being in a social bookmarking community of 30 students, a student will have access to 300 bookmarks instead of 10 each week. This multiplier effect has a two-fold benefit: first, students’ “content library” is effectively multiplied by the number of peers in their network; second, students are exposed to a wider variety of content from peers with different perspectives. For example, a student may have tagged an article on Football to “child labor in Pakistan”, thus bringing other students to perspectives which they have never thought about.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Multiplier Effect **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Social bookmarking is a tool that can be introduced into many educational settings – both formal and informal as the “multiplier effect” essentially lengthens and broadens the student’s “reading list”. However, social bookmarking when applied in lower education should be used with more caution. This is because younger students are more impressionistic and may have problems discerning between useful and “junk” materials. Older students on the other hand will have better judgments in selecting the contents to be shared and also be more selective when receiving information.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Social bookmarking websites’ “tagging” feature organizes information into structured and searchable content and the “rank and rate” feature delineates useful from less useful content. These 2 functions of social bookmarking website effectively filters and streamlines content to allow students to get a more focused and “peer-reviewed” search for relevant content. With a large enough database, which popular social bookmarking websites certainly hold, searching for content through these websites trumps “Googling” as while Google relies on algorithms to list the search results, social bookmarking websites organizes results based on actual human intelligence, which naturally should give users a more accurate results. Therefore, social bookmarking is a useful in helping students locate relevant and useful resources in a shorter time.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Eases research work **

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Connotea, a social bookmarking tool designed for researchers, clinicians and scientists, has additional features such as adding articles directly using Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), and then directly retrieving citation information for the DOI. It also automatically collects bibliographic information for any articles bookmarked by the user. Such features are very useful in supporting students’ hectic research work.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Whether existing as an individual in the entire social bookmarking community, or being a member of a specialized community, the ability to give and also receive feedback on each other’s bookmarks is in fact a form of social learning taking place, where users work collaboratively to achieve their goals. With a wide variety of expertise available in the community, students not only “sees” others perspective, but have a chance to collaboratively create new knowledge and discover new insights through debates and discussions.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Collaborative Learning **

**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Challenges of Social Bookmarking ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Opponents to employing social bookmarking tools in education quote the unreliability of folksonomy as its major shortcoming as folksonomy is user-generated and does not follow a traditional structure or hierarchy. Tagging of bookmarks is based on how the users perceive the content, and as a result, content may be “misrepresented” and be tagged out of context. For example, a search on “automobiles” might not return a result for an article on “BMW’s next-generation vehicles” as the originator tagged “BMW, nextgen, vehicles” to the article instead of “automobile”. Tagging may also be misrepresented through spelling errors, singular/ plural, synonyms/ antonyms.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Another challenge for employing such tools in education is the difficulty for instructors to monitor and maintain the direction of the content and discussions. Social bookmarking thrives on the dynamism of its content and their respective tags, however such traits deviate from the traditional conduct of lessons and have the potential to bring topics and discussions off-focus.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">In short, the very characteristics which made social bookmarking a viable tool to support education may also become its shortcomings if not managed well by educators.

**<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Promoting Social Bookmarking ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">While the popularity of social bookmarking websites has grown, the top social bookmarking site, Digg.com is only ranked #149 in “global traffic activity” by Alexa (Google and Facebook are ranked #1 and #2 respectively). This shows that despite its usefulness for individuals and communities to aggregate and share content, the take-up rate for social bookmarking could be much higher. To encourage more people to using social bookmarking tools, the public should be better informed of its concept and advantages over bookmarking using traditional web browsers. The added ability to tag and give comments when adding bookmarks through a social bookmarking tool increases the precision of users’ bookmarks, and being able to access other users’ bookmarks also improves efficiency in content searching.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Social bookmarking could also be further incorporated into popular web browsers or social networking sites where web users spend most of the online hours on. While many social bookmarking websites have add-on tools that can be installed onto web browsers, the fact that it is not organic to the web browser meant that less web savvy users are not cognizant to the presence of social bookmarking tools. **<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">Conclusion ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">There is no doubt that Web 2.0 is here to stay, and the education field is also hopping into this fast advancing bandwagon. Social bookmarking is not only a functional tool for individuals in their research, but is also a useful tool for collaborative and social learning. Therefore, it can definitely be a useful tool that can be employed by educators to strengthen the current suite of educational instruments.