Like many others, I am obliged to use an institutional VLE (in my case Blackboard) but get frustrated with updates being cumbersome and bookmarks being duplicated in the silos that are my Blackboard ‘courses’.
I now manage links in del.icio.us and simply link to the appropriate tag from the relevant area of my Blackboard course, as you can see in this image.
The steps are as follows
1. I organise the resources by syllabus topic so I choose a tag that relates to that topic, in this case information-systems-context, adding other tags as appropriate, http://del.icio.us/francesbell/information-systems-context
2. I then create a link to this in Blackboard. As I add resources to del.icio.us, these become available in Blackboard.
3. It is possible to enrol students in collaborative tagging by linking to the tag in general, rather than just in your own tags, e.g. http://del.icio.us/tag/information-systems-context . That way, students can contribute their own links for the benefit of the group.
I am very interested to hear how others use social bookmarking in conjunction with traditional learning environments.
P.S.
Liz Bennett asked me about this so I thought I would post it rather than hiding it in an email. I am sure this is something that lots of people do and maybe they can contribute additional ideas.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Anne Marie Cunningham // Nov 26, 2008 at 2:11 am
Thank you! I discovered that it is a good idea to make your tag distinctive. I chose fcs for familycasestudy and found that fcs meant more than one thing!
2 Frances // Nov 27, 2008 at 1:47 pm
There is always the question of how long a tag stays specific and distinctive. I had an embarrassing experience with linking to a dynamic search of youtube for videos of opensource software. Porn spammers started to tag their videos with these tags.
Leave a Comment