Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Week 3: Social Bookmarking


It seems to me that all of us are pretty “connected” these days. By "connected", I am not speaking mafia lingo; what I mean is that I assume that we all have multiple ways to access the Internet. I am confident in my assumption that this connectivity will continue to increase in the years to come.

I remember a time, not too long ago, that I would only access the Internet from one location, my desktop at school. I had dial-up at home which was way too slow, and besides, in a Web 1.0 world it really was not necessary to connect all the time. Slowly though, changes took place. I got a lap-top. Then I got an iPod. Next, my school enabled access to my email and files through the web. As time passed, it seemed that everything was becoming web-based. My dependency on the Internet continued to increase at a rapid pace to the point that I now feel naked in my classroom if I lose the connection (sorry about the visual).

Since everything (movie, music, grades, graduate courses) has become web-based, I find myself not only frequently accessing the Internet, but doing so in a huge variety of locations (this past weekend I was posting from the laundry room of a campground in upstate NY!) So what is the point? If everything is web-based, why should my favorite sites be excluded? That is the beauty of social bookmarking. Now, my bookmarks are only a few keystrokes away, whether I am at my desktop at school or at a cyber-café in Europe. This is so useful and its need so obvious, it makes me ponder, why didn’t I think of that?

I have not really explored the SOCIAL part of the bookmarking. I can clearly see the advantage of this feature, but at this point, I have zero friends according to Diigo. I am not worried though, I get a tremendous amount of sites from my “friends” on Facebook or Ning, or my “followers” on Twitter. I am sure it is only a matter of time until the sites that provide social bookmarking explode the way that MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter have. I can only imagine that ease of collaboration that social bookmarking will provide when the explosion does occur.
Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. PassionateteachJuly 23, 2009 at 7:39 PM

    Ahhh the beauty of social bookmarking! Information can come to you if you join groups of similar parties, you can keep your information organized and can locate it from any computer any where in the world, and you can also show your students this tool in the classroom. I think it is pretty amazing and I could not live without it. I guess it all depends on how much you use technology, but for no other reason, it is a great tool to keep information you uncover for your own professional development. I actually can acquire hours for "web-mining" and I can show proof through my diigo account. We are life long learners and what better way to keep track of what we are learning about for our future reference?

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)