Using Social Bookmarking to keep track of your online resources
It makes sense that students who take classes online will spend the bulk of their time reading and researching online as well. Finding reliable information about a topic can be a daunting task, and there can be literally hundreds of sites to sort through, and keeping track of all of these searches can be an assignment in itself. How to organize all of this web searching? Social Bookmarking sites provide an easy and fun solution.
Social Bookmarking sites allow Internet searchers to organize and categorize the sites they use. For example, the site del.icio.us allows users to collect their favorite sites, links, music, blogs and the like all organized in one place. This information can then be easily viewed from any computer with an Internet connection. The interesting part about this site is that everything on the site is someone’s “favorite,” so the site has a really great collection of information from a wide variety of sources. It’s a wonderful way to cut down the amount of time trying to find good sites to get information from.
Another interesting Social Bookmarking site is called StumbleUpon. Once the program is downloaded, and the icon appears in the browser toolbar, users can click “stumble” and random web pages will come up; these pages can be tailored to the user’s interests and preferences. For example, if the user wants to find random pages about only music, they select music, and various pages about music will appear each time “stumble” is clicked. What’s more, the user can rate the page in terms of how much he or she likes it, and the program learns from these ratings and adjusts the new pages which are brought up accordingly. It’s a great tool for conducting research on a particular topic as well as for learning information about a wide variety of topics. Many of the pages and topics which come up on StumbleUpon would eventually be found by users, but the site provides a much faster avenue for finding them.
Social Bookmarking is part of the next generation of information organizers, and it will be very interesting to see what comes next.
I found this post very interesting. I recently blogged on flippingburgersandbeyond.blogspot.com about the problem of keeping information organized. And while I know about social bookmarking sites, I wouldn’t have thought of using them for keeping track of information about a specific topic. Thanks for this post.