Managing
Online Resources
Social Bookmarking:
Why to Do it
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña
Solano
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post 207
Though I had been keeping Web sites
that I found and considered useful in an email folder, I was fortunately
introduced to social bookmarking about 8 years ago when I was taking a course
with the University of Oregon (UO). As a way to keep track of all those great
Webpages one gets to run into while browsing for information for my language
courses and for one’s research papers, our UO instructors asked us to open an
account at http://www.delicious.com. Later
on, a colleague of mine, Stephen Thergesen, an English teacher based in Denver,
Colorado, introduced me to http://www.paper.li, and
by means of that site I was able to “fatten” my Delicious account with more useful
sites for my teaching, research interests, and life-long learning.
I must confess that I have somehow
neglected my Delicious account because I found, thanks to Stephen Thergesen –again-, another much more dynamic site
to keep track of my Internet findings: http://www.scoop.it. But
anyhow, those sites are now part of my daily professional life and sharing with
my college students. And how have I been using them with my university
students? Let me share a couple of ideas with you:
1
|
Bookmarking in language
classes
|
·
To list webpages for language practice
aiming at working with vocabulary or grammar structures
·
To have a list of monolingual
dictionaries and thesaurus for writing tasks or reading exercises
|
2
|
Bookmarking in content
classes
|
·
To keep track of webpages for research
purposes: speeches, papers, WebQuests, etc.
·
To keep record of pages that can be
eventually used in one’s teaching practicum
|
There are more benefits than
challenges in terms of encouraging students to sign up for a bookmarking
account. In terms of educational benefits, students will take advantage of
social bookmarking by keeping a record of pages they can really profit from.
Anything they get to find online and that they consider useful for their future
professional practicum and later on practice, it is a plus for all students. It
will be up to them to keep on adding more and more sites to their bookmarks to
keep themselves current and updated with the new trends in their fields.
The challenge of keeping a social
bookmarking account is not connected to an instructor, but it is more linked to
the students. As a language teacher I am much into sharing stuff I find on my
regular browsing through the Web and enjoy sparing those sites with my pupils,
but it is in the end the learners’ decision to keep on feeding their bookmarks
and sharing them with their peers. And the only way to mitigate that is by
having students regularly share their findings in a link-sharing section that
might be curated by all learners as a wiki.
Sunday, November 08, 2015
