#14 Social Bookmarking

Have been at home and wished you could remember one of the great links you bookmarked on your computer at work? Or waded through the hundreds or thousands of bookmarks in your browser and wished for a better way to organize them? If so you’ll definitely be interested in social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is a way to organize web-based information resources so you can access them from any computer and share them with others.  Social bookmarking is different from bookmarking sites in your web browser because you can access the bookmarks from any computer, not just the one on which you created them, and because you can share them with other people as well as discover what others are bookmarking.

Most social bookmarking sites allow users to organize their bookmarks by “tagging” them. The great advantage to this over saving bookmarks in your browser is that you can use as many tags as you want for each bookmark giving you multiple ways to find it later when you need it.

Watch this video to learn how social bookmarking works:

While the video use delicous to demonstrate social bookmarking, I prefer to use another one called Diigo (pronounced Dee-go). Diigo has some additional features that are nice including the ability to share bookmarks with a group of people. ( Feel free to join our Learn Camp group and share your links with us! )

Here are two good videos to help you get started working with Diigo to save, share and manage your bookmarks.

Pinterest is another site that allows you to collect and organize online resources visually.

Check Jane Bozarth’s article about using Pinterest for L&D and check out Shannon Tipton’s great collection of creative learning ideas on Pinterest to see it in action.

If you use any of these I’d love to connect with you there. You can find me at https://www.diigo.com/user/tmiket and http://www.pinterest.com/tmiket/

Examples of how these tools can be used by L&D pros:

• Provide links to references and examples via Diigo for presentations and conference sessions. (A single link to many resources that can be updated even AFTER the fact.)
• Follow what other smart people in our field like Jane Bozarth, David Anderson and others are bookmarking.
• Create groups for sharing relevant links & resources with students and colleagues. If you use Articulate elearning tools, this group is a great example of curating content for a target audience.

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you use any social bookmarking tools such as Diigo, delicious or Pinterest?
2. Can you see any benefits from having access to what others are bookmarking?
3. How could this be used for learning/training?
4. Will you sign-up? Why or why not?