A recent quoted added to a discussion thread in my online course mentioned “Van Manen (2003, p.53) says “When someone has related a valuable experience to me then I have indeed gained something, even though the [thing] gained is not an identifiable entity”. Educators and aspiring ones can be authorities who speak of their own experiences in e-learning and e-teaching.”
This thought tweaked in me the idea of social book marking. This concept allows a user to bookmark any site they find on the internet whether it is a website, recipe, etext, music, etc. and store it online. By storing it online you can have access to your bookmarks from any computer that has an internet connection. It also allows you to add tags to your saved book marks. Tags are short identifiable words that you assign to the book mark so that you can find it quickly later. An example of this is, if you stored a website on how to bake a lemon pie, you may uses tags such as recipe, lemon, pie. As you accumulate book marks you may begin to store more and more under one particular tag (i.e. recipe). Also when you book mark a site you can also see how many other users (of a particular social book marking site) have also book marked that site for its relevance. In this respect you are telling one another “Here is a site about xxxx that I found extremely interesting and informative and I think others should look at it as well.”
If several users collaborate and use the same tag identifier then they will all be able to share and resource the same pages. These booking marking sites also allow you to do searches on their home page regarding a particular topic. In this respect as one user finds a page/experience that they have found invaluable then this e-tool becomes an extremely valuable tool as a method for sharing those experiences with other learners and facilitators.
Notes: Extra information on this topic can be found through Tony Karrer’s blog eLearning Technology, and through the del.icio.us website.
References
http://del.icio.us/ Yahoo! Inc., Sunnyvale, California.
Karrer, Tony. Tags: Social, Bookmarks, eLearning Technology. Los Angeles, California Retrieved May 15, 2007 from http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/search?q=social+bookmarks
Van Manen, M. (2003). Researching Lived Experience. Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. Ontario: Althouse Press