Presentation: Highpoint Symposium Workshop 2: Social Bookmarking and Social Networking

Many thanks to all those that attended this workshop on Social Bookmarking and Social Networking. Here is a link to the workshop presentation for your convenience. All other attendees, please feel free to download and view. (click on full screen for best viewing, escape button to exit full screen mode)

For those of you who would like to gain an initial feel for working informally in a social 'learning' network then visit Web2learning : http://web2learning.ning.com and ask for an invite. Additionally both myself and Heather will be happy to help with any general queries in the domain of Social Bookmarking, Social Networking and Web 2.0 technology.

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Workshop 2 Recap

The application of Web 2.0 technologies for educational purposes is gaining ground in many academic quarters. In this workshop we will highlight the features of two popular web 2.0 technologies Social Bookmarking and Social Networking and explore ideas of how they can be used for teaching, learning and professional development.

In this workshop we will

• explore the meaning of social bookmarking/ Social Networking as part of the Web 2.0 environment
• demonstrate the use of social bookmarking and networking (including del.icio.us, Ning)
  ask participants to share their thoughts and ideas for using these tools
• share how we have tried to use these tools as part of the pathfinder
• explore ways in which they can be useful for both students and staff

Highpoint Symposium Workshop 2: Social Bookmarking and Social Networking

The application of Web 2.0 technologies for educational purposes is gaining ground in many academic quarters. In this workshop we will highlight the features of two popular web 2.0 technologies Social Bookmarking and Social Networking and explore ideas of how they can be used for teaching, learning and professional development.

In this workshop we will

• explore the meaning of social bookmarking/ Social Networking as part of the Web 2.0 environment
• demonstrate the use of social bookmarking and networking (including del.icio.us, Ning)
  ask participants to share their thoughts and ideas for using these tools
• share how we have tried to use these tools as part of the pathfinder
• explore ways in which they can be useful for both students and staff

Web 2.0 resources

I was searching for contact details for a friend, with whom I used to work on the Chic Project at Teesside University [check out the really dodgy photos], when I came across a few really nice resources on Web 2.0. So I thought I'd place/tag them here.

Personal learning environments [a useful look at the practice/theory of personal learning or work environments, focusing upon iGoogle]

Web 2.0 social services for teaching and learning [with a useful case study on wikis]

Comm.unities.of.prac.tice 2.0: how social media support learning in practice [a nice thesis on the use of these tools, especially wikis blogs and social bookmarking, to support learning communities]

social bookmarking: how to exercise quality control?

Last week one of our library staff emailed me the following message about "Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting strives to identify serious academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research by offering an icon and an aggregation site where others can look to find the best academic blogging on the Net. http://bpr3.org/

Thinking that this might be something pathfinder colleagues would be interested in, I emailed the rest of the team. An interesting discussion followed, focusing upon issues of student credulity, evaluation of resources and quality control.

On the one hand, there was a view that:

"This would appear to come under the heading of 'elite social bookmarking' which to those of us who get frustrated by students' acceptance of all things internet as being of equal worth sounds like a really good idea.The site however is specifically about research. Has anyone done anything/does anyone know of anything in any subject area which attempts to use social bookmarking with some kind of gatekeeping/quality control?"

On the other, it was noted that :

"Have you considered getting the students to review each others bookmarks. If guidelines were issued as to what constitutes ‘good sources’ and each student was given a particular area to review, perhaps this would foster deeper consideration and a ‘finalised’ quality set of bookmarks. Discussion about the categorisation, the quality of source and the subject could ensue."

"The Web2.0 approach that accepts the wisdom of crowds would suggest that the key mechanism for quality control is the value placed on a bookmark by the students, in order to do/achieve something. This in turn is a function of the criteria that students are applying based upon tasks that are set or the use of bookmarks from trusted bookmarkers, or staff creating the bookmarks."

This led to the riposte that:

"Unfortunately the crowds put Galileo in a prison (or at least under house arrest).
I guess I am an old fashioned elitist and have the added disadvantage of coming from a subject background where there are right and wrong answers."

To which, our resident pragmatist noted:

"I have sympathy with both sides of this debate! I’m thinking of getting students to use social bookmarking to identify, categorise and critique online resources that relate to my module. So the idea is to get them to think critically about the info they find, its usefulness as evidence to support an argument, whether it’s likely to be biased in some way, whether any conclusions are based squarely on the data, etc…etc… So I hope to find a middle ground where I can harness the usefulness of the tool while retaining my right to say ‘That is unscientific nonsense’ ;-) (Although the hope is that the students might point that out themselves where it applies!)"

Social Bookmarking - Are you doing it, if not why not?

Some views on the benefits of social bookmarking that may be of interest. Specifically of interest may be reasons why teachers and students should join a social bookmarking site and a discussion of strategies for managing Social Bookmarking learning activities

Social Bookmarking - Reasons and Strategies for use

Let us know what you think!

Folksonomy II: the wisdom of crowds

I love social bookmarking and tagging. It's a wonderful way to refind old stuff, share new stuff and discover things or people that you would never have found any other way. Yesterday's folksonomy sessions hosted by the IOCT nailed these issues for me. The key outcomes from the sessions focus upon:

1. new tools that may build the social networking experience by enhancing recommendations to users, connecting users to each other, to websites and to web objects, including: StumbleUpon; FURL; del.icio.us; and Magnolia;
2. the impact upon a user's identity, through participation with others in various groups, and the meaning that those users generate from participating;
3. the user's perceptions of the value of specific interactions (with web sites, individual taggers, tags and groups);
4. the politics of Web 2.0, the control of vocabularies and the means of production;
5. the impact on the user of the context of specific tags, based upon taxonomies, individual need and another individual's identity, in order to create personal meaning;
6. Rashmi Sinha's view that "the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding much cognitive cost";
7. the relationship between objects to be tagged, individuals who are tagging, the tags or metadata assigned and the communities that are created;
8. the differences between folksonomy and taxonomy, around the limits on or lack of: structure; control; resources; participation; democratic processes; and the nature of emergent and validated behaviour;
9. analysis of tags through a clean-up process that merges some (e.g. e-learning and elearning) or controls stems (are tags, tagging and tagger the same for analysis?) or evaluates synonyms;
10. the value for refindability; team-work; understanding context; storing resources; working across silos; and networking - I'm really interested in these as possible areas for development for support staff, as well as academic teams and student groups, and maybe in combination with other applications like Facebook for wider networking;
11. the user's ability to use tools for saving, refinding, exploring, searching and interacting, and the belief that granularity has value and that algorithms for searching can make life more efficient;
12. selective sharing, and building or evaluating trust in individual taggers, tags or web objects; and
13. the portability of tags, descriptions, identities and communities across applications over time.

In simple terms tagging and group folksonomies can impact upon work processes, and that will be a fruitful avenue for WP1 and WP2, as well as WP7. We need to focus upon the power for refindability of information, team-work, understanding context, storing resources, working across silos and networking.

However, the sessions got me thinking about control and power and politics, and the work of Ivan Illich. De-schooling and the impact on the role of the professional, in order to broaden a social democratic agenda, is definitely an area for more exploration. As is the merging of work and non-work identities where tools are used in both arenas (if such a dichotemy actually exists).