BP5_20091102_Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking

Mark Van Doran, an honored professor at Columbia University and Pulitzer prize winner, died in 1972, but his observations about education still ring true in today’s information and media rich world.

Social bookmarking is a 21-century tool educators can use to assist students in learning any content and allows users access to their shared research from any computer that has Internet access. It is also a tool that can empower today’s students for the professional world they will be entering. Having a knowledge base is an important factor in any trade or profession. Social bookmarking allows users to easily share information with others that work with their field and access this information from any Internet connection. In November of 2009, ebizmba.com, a site that describes itself as, “an eBusiness Knowledgebase,” explained the business and marketing value of this technology and provided a list of the top 20 social bookmarking sites.

The pedagogical relevance and application of these tools is multifaceted. Co-director of the Red Cedar Writing Project and associate professor at Central Michigan University asserts the value of social bookmarking as a replacement for what he refers to as the “archaic” and “formulaic” research writing process of using 3 by 5 note cards for note taking and source management (Hicks, 2009). Such replacement, he explains is a better fit to the writing process itself, provides the opportunity to include multimedia sources, and addresses the real world demands of the information age.


There are many educational uses for this technology that could be incorporated into any area of study. On her blog, Kim Flick shares a detailed step-by-step lesson plan for using social bookmarking. It involves learners joining a class bookmarking network, reading two things bookmarked by the teacher, adding relevant bookmarks, and tagging. The topic of her lesson is career research, but as stated earlier, it could be applied to any topic or content area (2009).

While investigating this topic, the most commonly referenced social bookmarking application I have found is Delicious.com. While this is a great place for educators, or any professionals, to collaborate and share resources, Education World explains that it may not be appropriate for K-12 as it isn’t filtered (Jackson, 2009). In this article, Jackson does mention other social bookmarking applications such as BuddyMarks, another web based application, and Scuttle, a downloadable server based application, that have closed group and filtering abilities.

This leads me back to a topic mentioned in previous my blogs, teaching students source evaluation skills. With so much information available at their fingertips, it is critical that students develop these skills. Social bookmarking and tagging could be an excellent way to address this. Regardless of the topic, students could be tasked with bookmarking, tagging, and explicitly differentiating both examples and non-examples of reliable reference sources. This would be a way for teachers to assist life-long discovery.