Social bookmarking. When you save a Web site as a favorite
or bookmark, it's added to a list that stays within that browser. Use another
computer, and you don't have access to that bookmark. When you use a
social-bookmarking service, you save your bookmarks on that server, making them
available to you wherever you access the Web, and allowing you to share them
with others.
Ask your students to create accounts on a social-bookmarking service and to
bookmark Web sites, news articles, and other resources relevant to the course
you're teaching. Create a unique "tag" for your course and have your students
use it, so that their bookmarks can be easily found. Ask students to apply
multiple tags to the resources they bookmark, as a way to help them locate their
bookmarks quickly and to prepare them for the kind of keyword searching they'll
need to do when using library databases. If you're teaching a face-to-face or
hybrid class, be sure to spend some class time having students share their
latest finds, so they can see the connections between this work outside class
and classroom discussions.
Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them
to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook
every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the
class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's
learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and
share.
