May 10, 2007
Social Bookmarking, Part 5: More Things to Do (Education & Teaching)
What about in a course? Can you use social bookmarking with students in classes? Of course. Just as with research assistants, ask the students to make their own account. Make sure they are using the same social bookmarking system that you are using, since you can't tag links for someone else's attention if they are on a different system.
Idea
Create a course account. Tag links to match the topics in the syllabus.
Example
Idea
Use your social bookmarking tool to manage the class assignments and readings.
Example
Bookmark the readings, and tag those for the next class session as 2do.
Bookmark web pages for the class to review or analyse, put brief instructions in the comment section.
Idea
Give students an assignment to use Del.icio.us.
Example
Assign students topics to search. Have them evaluate the selected links, and tag the best for you to review as potential additions to the course account. If you agree, add the links. If not, save a search strategy that might help them find better materials.
More ideas for assignments:
m2h blogging: writing and researching using del.icio.us
A student's point of view:
Assignment 2 - Digital Technologies. The Practical Application of Digital Technologies. Year 1: Module 01237 Digital Technologies Assignment 2; Reflective Learning Log
Look for more ideas at Teachers Teaching Teachers.
Posted by pfa at 08:58 PM | Comments (0)
Social Bookmarking, Part 4: More Things to Do (Research Support)
Now for some ways to use social bookmarking to support your work in research.
Idea
Collect items for a bibliography.
Example
This lets you collect the articles in one spot while you are looking at them on the screen. If your campus uses a proxy server, the URLs may not work for a friend or colleague at another institution, and if you are off campus, they may require that you login to make the URLs work again. However, you have all the articles you want for a specific project collected in one space, which is handy when you start writing.
A tip for making this work well is to tag each one consistently with what it is (for example, "articles") and another tag to indicate the project. This allows you to then assemble the list later with a URL that will combine both tags with a plus sign (+). For example:
http://del.icio.us/username/articles+projectname
Idea
Save your searches. When you are working and doing a complicated search, save your search strategy as a bookmark, then you can come back to it at a later time. You can also then share the search strategy with colleagues, partners, or students. Imagine assigning an assistant to work through the search results after you perfect the search!
Example
Notice that the example search strategies include both web searches in Google as well as database searches in PubMed. You can also save searches from Yahoo, Google Images, Google News, and many other tools. Sometimes it requires special finagling to make this work (like with PubMed); sometimes the strategy is shown in the URL (the web site address), and all you have to do is save. If you need help finding out if this will work with your favorite online search tools, ask a librarian.
Idea
Have students or assistants search for you, select items, and tag them for you.
Example
Remember in the first page of examples that you could use for: tags to mark something for a friend or colleague? Well, people can do the same for you. If you are having a student or assistant do preliminary searches and select items for you to review, there are two ways you could do this.
The first (and usually worst) way would be to log in to your account or give the assistant your password. That is bad for all the same reasons it is usually bad to give anyone any of your passwords. When is it OK? When the account is a shared account already, and the assistant is a member of the group of people who are already allowed to edit the account.
The second way is to ask the assistant to make their own account. It is free, so there is no cost involved. Ask the assistant to do the searches logged in as themselves, and tag them with your account name. You can review their selections, whatever tags they added, and make your own decisions. You will need to review them to add them to your account, but this will still be a whole lot faster than doing it yourself!
Posted by pfa at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)
Social Bookmarking, Part 3: More Things to Do (Web Sites)
OK, more ideas of things to do. This group looks at some ways to use social bookmarking (and other Web 2.0 tools) to support building web sites.
Idea
Collect resources to create a teaching / learning guide.
Example
Delicious collection becomes a web page resource guide on Avian Flu.
This:
Del.icio.us Avian Flu Collection
becomes this:
Library Guide on Avian Flu Resources
Part of the advantage of this is that as you add new resources, they automatically appear in the web guide without needing to do anymore coding or ask a web master for help. It is also really easy to delete links that have gone bad or disappeared -- literally just clicking a button!
Idea
Use an account to feed content to a web site. Example above demonstrates this with Del.icio.us, but guess what? You can do the same thing with anything that has an RSS feed option (blogs, Twitter, Flickr, search results from Google News, search results from databases like PubMed, tables of contents from you favorite journals, etcetera.
Here is another example like the right above, but instead using a blog to feed content to the web page.
This:
http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/faceit
becomes this:
http://www.dent.umich.edu/faceit
Posted by pfa at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2007
Social Bookmarking, Part 2: Things to Do (With and For People)
Here are some ideas and examples of things you can do with social bookmarking. Please note, examples are given in Del.icio.us, but these ideas also work with Furl or Connotea or most other similar tools. This first group of examples look at using social bookmarking, well, socially! To work with other people, support a team effort, communicate, answer questions, etcetera.
Idea
Discover and track new items on a topic of hot interest.
Examples
* Del.icio.us: Tags: Web 2.0
* Del.icio.us: Tags: Crowdsourcing
* Del.icio.us: Tags: Second Life & Education
Idea
Have a shared account for a team of people working on the same project.
Examples
* Del.icio.us: UM Health Sciences Libraries
* Del.icio.us: UM Dentistry Library
* Del.icio.us: Let's Face It
Idea
Collect links to answer a question from a boss or administration.
Example
Q: Keep me up to date on new resources with avian flu and pandemic response for the University's planning committee on disaster preparedness.
A: Del.icio.us: UM Health Sciences Libraries: Avian Flu
Idea
Share resources with a coworker or individual team member.
Example
Del.icio.us: Ed's Stuff for Nancy
Idea
Answering reference questions.
Example
Del.icio.us: Rose Finds Things on Chiari Syndrome for a Patient
Posted by pfa at 09:45 AM | Comments (0)
Social Bookmarking, Part 1: Why & How To
* Have you ever printed off a web page to take to a different computer so you could bookmark it where you need it?
* Or emailed a link from home to work for the same reason?
* Or been traveling and wished you could get a bookmark from your home computer?
If your head is nodding, then social bookmarking is for you!
Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking tools began life as tools to answer the problems described above. However, once people had their bookmarks online, very quickly it became apparent that these could be used for other purposes. A few of the other ways I use social bookmarking (aside from bookmarks for my own use) are:
- to see what is interesting to people I respect;
- to create an RSS feed for a website;
- to collect websites to answer someone else's question;
- to collect websites for my boss or administration on a topic of interest.
The slide presentation below gives a quick introduction to how to create a Del.icio.us account, some of the issues involved, and examples of ways to use Del.icio.us for yourself or in education.
Next let's look at some useful ways to use social bookmarking.
Posted by pfa at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)