Collaborative bookmarking in education

To continue the series of posts on the theme of internet-based tools for teaching and learning, here is my latest thinking on collaborative bookmarking in education.

Firstly, the term I'm using is collaborative bookmarking rather than social bookmarking.  This is because I'm trying to put it within a educational context.  The emphasis, therefore, is collaboration or co-construction of knowledge and understanding and using an online bookmarking service as part of such a pedagogical design.

The best way of experiencing online bookmark is to experience it for yourself and, unlike other online tools with potential for education, there is a clear rationale for personal bookmarking as it's a much, much better than saving website links than the old favourites, folders way.  Part of this is about digital literacy, we really need to help our educators understanding and experience key social media concepts for themselves to help them comprehend how formal can utilise such tools.  For example, for social bookmarking tagging is key.  The power is in the multiple tags you can put against single sites so that sorting and categorisation can be nuanced and flexible.  Although tagging exists across all social media, it's amazing how it isn't used by the vast majority in most tools/services.  With bookmarking you pretty much have to tag, so it's a good way of forcing people to learn this skill and experience its benefits.  This is the folksonomy concept.

The learning context is simply - group creation of a relevant weblinks so that the workload is shared and the useful resources people find can be built up into a bank of resources for groups in the future.  The principle is sound so what are the tools?
I've used two services: http://www.delicious.com/ and http://www.diigo.com/.  Delicious has changed much over the years.  As a pure bookmarking tool, in its current version, this is my favourite.  It's brief marriage to yahoo didn't do it any favours (I went elsewhere whilst this occurred) and its progress has been set up a few years as a result.  It's strength is its simplicity and the stacks feature is a good one.  I can see how stacks could be utilise for student activities where they are asked to find and present as a resource relevant websites on a particular topic.

However, for a group learning context its not ideal.  For this I would recommend http://www.diigo.com/ as its more geared towards education.  A free education license (http://www.diigo.com/education) gives you the ability to create accounts for students in a group.  You could use such a group to share resources and I've helped a number of colleagues do this for their courses.  What's good is that you get a url for your group area which you can share and post to your vle area websites.  Also, with diigo you can make notes against each bookmark or make notes on the webpage itself.  I've used diigo to plan sessions like this one http://groups.diigo.com/group/web20_learning with colleagues.

So what's my experience of bookmarking in my UK HE institution?  Overall, I would say the courses I've helped with haven't made much use of their group bookmarking facility. Its worth reflecting on why?

• Usability has an impact as it's not great.  Ok, there's a diigo toolbar but what if your educational institution won't let you do this? Well, you are left with their rather cumbersome usability. Also, access to any diigo requires a login.  Although you can create this for students its still an extra step.  I advise where possible you duplicate other logins they may have.
• There's an ethos of sharing at the heart of social media and when shoehorned into a formal education context it often doesn't sit well.  There's an element of competition, an element of selfishness ingrained into the mentality of learners who have come through schooling and have arrived at higher education - at least at the moment.
• The common context for use has been as a course wide sharing of readings and references related to the writing of the assignment.  Technically students should be collecting these throughout the course.  However, its common for this to occur in a mad rush at the end.  There's no time or use for sharing resources at this stage.  It would be preferable to relate the sharing of web resources to a particular learning activity so that the rationale and incentive is clear and you can quickly reach large number of bookmarks.  It's only when you have lots that you see the benefit of having a dedicated bookmarking service.  Otherwise, students will simply paste via a forum or email.

I've had a section within my session 21st Century Tools for Teaching and Learning on bookmarking since I started it a 3 years ago.  I've been able to create a diigo create and hand out logins for people to try out the uploading process.  It's worked well.  At the last day I did on 7th Feb there were interesting ideas of using it for sharing resources amongst staff and parents.

I'd welcome any comments about your experiences of bookmarking in education, whatever the context.

Using forums/blogs/wikis to facilitate learning: A summary

As usual for me, I'm breaking away from an existing train of thought in these posts for something different.

When you work with VLEs/LMSs you deal extensively with the text-based communication tools that exist in all systems.  The 3 biggies are the discussion/forum tool, the blog/journal tool and the wiki tool.  Explaining how each can be used to facilitate learning within learning activities is a key challenge for the Learning Technologist.  What's really important is that you articulate clearly the subtle differences between these tools and what their pedagogical affordances are. 

Here are my attempts to sum things up:

Discussion/forum tool

Use the asynchronous online discusssion tool for engaging students in a text-based dialogue:

• to facilitate a meaningful learning dialogue amongst students
• to develop students‘ written communication skills
• to allow time and space for tutors and students articulate clearly and thoughtfully when engaging in a dialogue
• to flexibly engage with students

Blog/journal tool

Use the blog/journal tool:

• to facilitate reflection amongst students
• to facilitate individual feedback from tutor to student through private journal/blog structures
• to develop students‘ written communication skills
• to allow time and space for students articulate clearly and thoughtfully when reflecting on their learning
• to flexibly engage with students

Wiki tool

Use the wiki tool for co-construct text:

• to facilitate collaboration amongst students the editing and refining of eachothers words within a group project context
• to facilitate co-operation amongst students through the allocation of tasks within a group project context
• to allow time and space for students articulate clearly and thoughtfully when writing on a particular topic

There's much more to it of course.  However, I'm trying to summarise here and give the key messages.  I welcome the views of others.

Formal/Informal learning

It's been a while since I last blogged. This is mainly due to getting married and going on honeymoon. A welcome distraction from my Learning Technology Learning.

Recently I've found myself reading more academic articles than blogs. I aimed to catch up with my blog reading but it's been enlightening to gain some academic perspectives. Overall, blog reading is easier. It fits in with my informal learning ethos and lends itself to the extraction of ideas which I can then weave together as I reflect. Academic article reading is hard but rewarding. Hopefully I can achieve a good balance of learning from both in the future.

A recent bit of learning has been around formal learning on reading the paper Theories of formal and informal learning in the world of web 2.0 by Charles Crook (2008). He says:

"It is the act of deliberate teaching that ‘formalises’ learning. But deliberate teaching is complemented by deliberate learning. Ideally, both parties in the
educational contract have a degree of this intent – albeit not equally well or equally enthusiastically developed."

It is easy to bash formal education but the above reminds us that, in essence, its a wonderful thing. It's about deliberately engendering learning and this should be celebrated. So what's the place of informal learning? I promote informal learning because I know how powerful it can be and I would disagree with the notion that the only "proper" learning is done through formal education. Where it's good quality a formal course is the best and easiest way of accelerate your learning in a certain subject. But such instances are not always available when, and where, you want them. This is where informal learning comes into play. It's take a certain skillset and mindset to do it effectively but these can be learned. And certainly from my perspective, technology is fundamental to being able to realise it.

The above quote hints that motivation isn't always there with formal learning. Essentially in schools, we are forcing people to learn whether they want to or not. Or, at least, we are trying to. Informal learning only exists where there is motivation to learn. But if we took away formal education I'm not so sure that everyone would jump into doing it themselves enthusiastically. The learner control aspect is often mooted is a big plus the informal learning and that this can aid with learners who are disenfranchised from formal education. Here there is a clear role for informal learning and what we need are processes and support mechanism in place to help learner get started.

Formal Learning/Informal Learning/Just Plain Learning

There are no real interest new ideas in this post, just some reflections on a personal venture of mine. I felt the need for self-disclosure - satisfying the basic human need to share and communicate.

It's been a long time since my last post. This is mostly due to an assignment I am writing for an MA I've just started. I've toyed with the idea of doing one for a while now. I work in an academic institution but my role is mainly one of learning design, advising people on learning design, delivering training, setting up VLE pages. There is no immediate imperative to become 'academic'. However, I resolve to do one for the following reasons:

- It's free (as a member of staff at the Institute of Education)
- The subject matter is ICT in Education so it should be topics that I can relate to
- I aim to learn, learn, learn. This is the main reason. I'll be forced to research areas where I currently scratch the surface giving myself an academic rigour to some of my ideas. That's the theory anyway.
- I'm a firm believer in informal learning. My use of this blog and reading other blogs is my primary learning method and it works for me. However, for many of those in education they want to stamp of approval that an award like this gives. It's the only language they understand. So by doing this I will hopefully gain respect, gain validity. The validity I want is validity for my ideas and suggestions around learning technologies.
- I hope to gain insight into being a student in Higher Education. I've already done a lot of this. I'm learning first hand about the type of students we get, the approaches the lecturers take and difficulties students face.

I did two thirds of an MA 5 years ago but never got around to finishing it. At the time I couldn't see any real point. It had no real impact on what I was doing but now is different. So now I am starting again from scratch and viewing it as a learning exercise. The only real downside is that studying competed with my time previously devoted to my informal learning in the blogosphere. I will hopefully manage this better from now on.

I will also say this. It's hard to study and work. I'm used to working, coming home and not working. Now things are different. However, I guess this is now in line with my views on learning. Learning doesn't just happen within formal education structures, it happens all the time at the learner's discretion. I'm trying to view much of my work as learning so why not extent this out beyond the four wall of my office. I think that makes sense.

Happy Xmas everyone.