Linklogs and Social Bookmarking
Also referred to as a form of social bookmarking, linklogs are becoming a popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share a wide range of Internet resources.
This is achieved by sharing information via user-created Internet bookmark lists and classifying the items to improve their usefulness as a resource. Such bookmarks can be kept for your own use or shared with others or the world!
Social bookmarking tools often allow you to clip all or part of a web page you are bookmarking and provide the facility for comments - therefore offering the potential to annotate and what is sometimes called content "meaning making". An example of this is the concept of tagging.
Tagging is a term used in a number of contexts for different purposes, mostly referring to adding a tag of some form. Tags are best considered as as a keyword that refers to an "ad hoc" classification and sorting of information. Within "Web 2.0" applications, tagging can be applied to the URLs of web pages, to photographs and images as well as ideas, concepts and various projects.
Social bookmarking can create new educational opportunities. Examples where children, young people and educators could derive benefit from this technology include:
- Finding and creating new learning communities of users based around a certain topic
- Sharing access to categorised resources in an efficient way
- Developing new insights about a topic by discovering the views and perspectives of others
- Creating a range of contextual taxonomies that carry a specific meaning for a learning community
Sharing information by using other Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS Feeds, wikis, weblogs and blogs. Alternatively, the use of social bookmarking may form part of the integrated approach used by many of the software suites that power VLE (virtual learning environments) solutions for schools, colleges and universities.
The very nature of social bookmarking does not make it easy to illustrate real school-based or professional examples at present. However, two popular social bookmarking services that are available on the Internet are Delicious and Furl but there are many more available to choose from and both Google and Yahoo are offer bookmarking features.
Thursday, 2nd September 2010
Russell Educational Consultancy and Productions