Anti-Social Bookmarking Intervention

OK, I was wrong. Video sharing isn't the most challenging Web 2.0 tool for me. Social bookmarking is my breaking-point this week. There is nothing social about what I have been doing. I have been using this new tool in the same manner I would use "Add to Favourites" on my computer, only this was an online version.



Nathaniel's Photostream: Flickr

 I originally chose Evernote over Diigo simply because of the OneNote feature which seamlessly blended with Evernote. OneNote has been a great find for me because it is the electronic notebook I had been searching for. This is truly a great resource for compiling endless forms of information. Since I discovered OneNote on my latest laptop (it came already installed) and got a glimpse of what it could do, I have been creating notebooks for a multitude of things. For example, I have a private notebook for my Web 2.0 Tools. In that notebook, I have several sections for each tool I investigate. Within each section, I have numerous pages which contain various pieces of information I find about each tool. If I wanted to be social, I could email my Web 2.0 Tools notebook to someone. If they have OneNote, they can open my notebook in OneNote. The great thing is, even if they don't have OneNote, they can open my Web 2.0 Tools notebook as a webpage. All the pages in that notebook would then show as attachments.

I can also create a public notebook. The process to set one up is simple due to the notebook setup wizard. I can set my notebook up to be used on multiple computers, or with multiple people on either a shared network or in a shared folder. While I did not complete the process to test the sharing, it seemed very straight forward and user-friendly.

Admitting my problem was my first hurdle. I really thought I was social bookmarking! When did I realize my misconception? When I read Will Richardson's second paragraph on "Social Bookmarking Services" (p. 89) which indicated not only did I have to use an online bookmarking service and include tags, I had to share them. Pardon me? As I read further, I realized I had two further misconceptions about social bookmarking. Firstly, I thought that the social part meant I could access my bookmarks anywhere – I was being antisocial because I was the only one accessing them. Secondly, I didn't think about my bookmarks beyond my personal use – was there one? I didn't realize how I tagged my information linked to others.


Nathaniel's Photostream: Flickr

 But I did learn a little about this sharing thing. I will acknowledge this much; using Diigo helped me understand the sharing aspect better than Evernote did. I searched and searched on Evernote for a public listing of all bookmarking available through Evernote. The only one I could find was the frequently asked questions (or help) about bookmarking. I'm not saying the social aspect isn't there; it's just that I couldn't find it.

However, on Diigo, I found it easily under the "community" tab. I was easily able to search topics either in my own folders or in the community folders. Even more exciting to me was the "groups" tab. In that tab I can either create my own groups or browse groups which already exist. In exploring groups that already exist, I can identify a category, such as education, and browse groups by that category. The first group I found when I searched this was Diigo in the Classroom. It was a site for collaboration and sharing of ideas on how to use Diigo in the teaching and classroom practices. Within that group I found many suggestions for lessons and sample lesson plans.

So painless and so efficient - this is invaluable to me. I can think of endless examples of times I have searched on the internet for ideas and found nothing. Even for this assignment I had searched "social bookmarking blogs" on the internet, and really didn't find what I was looking for. I probably spent about half an hour searching before I had abandoned it. However, in literally less than five minutes, I had found several sites of exactly what I was looking for on Diigo.

This brings me to phase two of my intervention - tags. I am admitting my failure to adequately tag my social bookmarking entries. This is where I fall into a second old habit. In Evernote I was simply creating notebooks to organize my information in. Now, I wasn't too worried about this because Evernote has the ability to search every word you have saved in those social bookmarks and will highlight any article that has the word in it that I am looking for (as does OneNote). This seems to justify being negligent about tagging, but Pam Berger and Sally Trexler explain the importance of metadata in Choosing Web 2.0 Tools for Learning and Teaching in a Digital World (2010, pp. 45-49).

Berger and Trexler identify seven functions (or basically reasons) for bookmarking. This is beyond what I had considered, so I will share these great insights.

The first four are intrinsic to the tagger and include: identifying what or who the Web site is about; identifying what it is (e.g., article, podcast, blog); identifying who owns it; and refining categories. The last three functions are relevant to the tagger only and include; identifying qualities or characteristics (e.g., funny, inspirational); self reference (e.g., mystuff, first name); and task organizing (e.g., to read, biomes paper). (p. 46)

And the end result according to Berger and Trexler is that a tag pattern emerges. Why is this important? Because the result is tag lists or tag clouds. These become great visualizations for what a site is about. This means we can view the tags prior to exploring the information contained within the resources, allowing us to assess its value prior to reading and thereby eliminating irrelevant or identifying relevant resources earlier rather than later.

Intervention session number two: successful!

OneNote and Beyond on a Personal Level

Was the intervention a success on a personal level? I think it was. I realized the value of both Diigo and Evernote. I can understand why a person would use both...they each offer a different form of social bookmarking. My exploration on a personal level also took me into the tools and features of each product. I wasn't as familiar with Diigo, so I watched the tutorial videos available on their site. These videos were great and I was excited to learn more about the highlighting and sticky note tools. I knew they were there, but had not explored them yet. Of course, I immediately wanted to find these tools on Evernote. I couldn't. I could understand why so many people had chose Diigo over Evernote in my previous course.

I did search further, because tools this valuable had to be part of Evernote – and they were. They are a part of OneNote. OneNote has many tools – I am even more excited about OneNote now. There are tagging options available, such as "remember for blog", or "highlight", and numerous other preset tags which you can add to your page by simply clicking on them. However, you can also add custom tags to the list for frequently used tags. You can create an Outlook item (appointment or contact) with the information contained on the page in OneNote. (Imagine you sent a picture of a business card from your phone, to Evernote and then sent it to OneNote for a business card directory. You could add an appointment from that business card just by clicking on it – all the information is immediately transferred from the business card to your Outlook appointments in your calendar – no need to transfer information manually!)

I can also publish anything from my notebooks to my blog. I can add voice recordings to OneNote. So if I was taking notes on a presentation, I could have the record function working as well, and would be able to go back to the recording later if need be. There is even an option to convert handwriting to print. How does this relate to social bookmarking? It just makes the tool more versatile to handle various forms of data, and more easy to share.

How about the fun stuff? Shelfari is one social bookmarking tool that I think is great. Although I haven't played with this enough yet, I am already seeing the potential for sharing and discussing books with both people I know and invite to join me, and those I don't know but are interested in the same books. I never thought of this a social bookmarking, but it is literally social "book"marking!

On Facebook, although it seems to be less formal bookmarking, I have shared and found a variety of information related to personal and professional interests simply because someone else presented it. I follow groups I have found and others have suggested – similar to the groups I found on Diigo in that it is a gathering of information based on a category.

Professional Intervention in Social Bookmarking

I found a wiki related to social bookmarking because of the "Diigo in Education" group I discovered in Diigo. That alone cured me of any antisocial bookmarking practices I held.  Collaboration is so much more efficient!

The wiki is Digitally Speaking/Social Bookmarking and Annotating by Bill. Bill does a great job explaining social bookmarking and the various uses for it in the classroom. What I also like is that he has used some of the social bookmarking tools available in Diigo right in the text of his wiki, so you experience the value of the tools as you navigate his site. He also highlights the importance of some of the information you find on a social bookmark, such as the number of times the site has been bookmarked (to show how many other people are using that resource, or who else is interested in that topic). This is important when you are researching a topic – as Bill points out, it is a way of helping others navigate the multitude of information available on the internet (and added via various other sharing devices).



Nathaniel's Photostream: Flickr

 Bill also points out the teamwork, or collaborative, benefit of social bookmarking. In Diigo, team members can add highlighting, annotations, sticky notes, comments and other social bookmarks to items they are working on. Students and teachers can collectively add information to categories they are investigating by using "common tagging language" (Bill, 2009).

Berger and Trexler list Ten Reasons to Use Social Bookmarking in Education, in Choosing Web 2.0 Tools for Learning and Teaching in a Digital World (p. 51). To summarize, students are using 21^st century skills and technology to navigate and make sense of information in a collaborative manner when engaged in social bookmarking, which can be either public or private and is accessible anytime. The ability to share findings adds a meaningful component to tasks. Because it is meaningful, it is easier to teach skills necessary for evaluating reliability of various resources/sources and note taking skills (Berger & Trexler, pp. 52-55).

Lastly, the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds and have information added to categories or groups come right to my reader allows the use of such a tool to be easily managed and merged with other Web 2.0 tools. As a research tool, if I have subscribed to the right categories, a lot of the information I need will come right to me. As a teaching tool, if I have students collaborating on a group, all their work can also come right to me, making monitoring and assessing of such a task also manageable.


Nathaniel's Photostream: Flickr


I feel good – the intervention was a success in my eyes. Thank goodness for the social bookmarking, because I didn't have enough in my own Evernote or Diigo accounts to do this one alone!












References

Berger, P. & Trexler, S. (2010).  Chossing web 2.0 tools for learning and teaching in a digital world. Sanata Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited.

Bill. (2010, circa Jan.) Digitally speaking: Social bookmarking and annotating, retrieved from http://digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com/Social-Bookmarking-and-Annotating

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.