Social bookmarking tools allow you to save, curate, and share online resources.
Typically, social bookmarking tools ask you to install an extension in your web browser. Then, when you arrive at a web page or other online resource that you want to bookmark, you click the extension button, which saves the URL of the page as well as (often) an image from the page and the first few lines of text on the page -- this helps you, at a later date, identify the content of the page that you saved.
Additionally, you can add "tags" or "key words" to the saved bookmark to further assist you in subsequently finding that page. Often, you can also annotate your saved bookmarks and highlight specific passages of text in order to comment on or draw attention to the most salient aspects of an online resource.
Social bookmarking tools also allow you to create groups or categories in order to aggregate similar bookmarked pages. Usually, you can share these groups of related bookmarks with other people (example). Some bookmarking tools also allow you to join groups that share an interest, so that all members of the group can collaborate on finding, curating, and sharing relevant online resources. You can also access your bookmarks from any location or device.
Examples of Usage and Best Practices
A few examples of how social bookmarking tools can be used in the post-secondary setting:
- Lecture and Seminar Readings: Tagging allows students to draw connections between the different concepts and readings covered in the course. If the platform supports collaborative notes and comments, it is a great way to contribute ideas or initiate discussions online that could continue into the classroom.
- Course Curriculum Development: As you build your course units or themes, you can collate websites, academic journal papers, or other online resources with the corresponding unit/theme tags.
- Collaborative Group Work: If you have an open-ended group project or assignment in the course, you can ask students to share resources or topics that interest them. They can then find other students who share a similar interest and form a group. This also allows you the opportunity to comment or give further directions if the resources that are contributed need further refining.
For best practice, it is recommended to first choose a social bookmarking platform that meets your teaching and learning needs. Then create a group for your students on the platform, and as your course proceeds, have students find and add resources to the group that are relevant to the topics of your course. Here's an example. Students can also be asked to annotate the resources that they (or their classmates) have bookmarked.
Evidence of Efficacy
- "Collaborative tagging and/or social bookmarking of learning resources foster a context of personalized social learning. From a constructivist point of view, tags shared by users become significant learning resources providing the teaching/learning process and online research with a social dimension." -- Social Bookmarking Tools as Facilitators of Learning and Research Collaborative Processes: The Diigo Case (PDF)
- "[Social bookmarking] particularly fosters the cohesion of research groups by monitoring information tagged by different users. It add more dynamics to the organization, communication, and updating of bibliographical references concerning a specific theme." -- Social Bookmarking Tools as Facilitators of Learning and Research Collaborative Processes: The Diigo Case (PDF)
- "[Social bookmarking] was effective at fostering an emergent collaborative knowledge base and ultimately supported student learning. Comments throughout the archive indicate that students regularly were exposed to new ideas and had applications for those ideas." -- Building a Collaborative Knowledge Base in Diigo: How Links, Tags, and Comments Support Learning (PDF)
More Resources
- Social Bookmarking. Wikipedia.
- Ruffini, Michael. Classroom Collaboration Using Social Bookmarking Service Diigo.
- 7 Things You Should Know about Collaborative Annotation (PDF).
Suggested Social Bookmarking Tools
- Raindrop. Displays saved bookmarks in various attractive layouts (example). You can easily share collections of similar bookmarked items.
- Pocket. Easy to use but limited features. You can share individual bookmarks but not groups (lists) of bookmarks.
- Diigo. A no-nonsense social bookmarking tool.
- Instapaper. Among other features, Instapaper offers a "rapid reading" mode that displays words from a bookmarked article one at a time, which can increase a user's reading speed.
All of the foregoing tools offer a free level as well as a paid level with additional features.
Other tools that are more suited to academic research (citation management) include RefWorks, Endnote, Zotero, and Mendelay. See a comparison of these tools provided by the Library at the University of Toronto and another by the Journal of the Medical Library Association. Note that RefWorks is centrally supported by the Library at the University of Waterloo.
Support
If you would like support applying these tips to your own teaching, CTE staff members are here to help. View the CTE Support page to find the most relevant staff member to contact.
Questions?
Contact Mark Morton.
This Creative Commons license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as they credit us and indicate if changes were made. Use this citation format: Social Bookmarking Tools. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo.