Thing 13: Social Bookmarking and Tagging

Share your thoughts about tagging. Is tagging a useful way to organize your digital resources and why? What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages? What is important to think about before assigning tags to bookmarks or other Internet content?

I believe tagging would be a much more useful way to organize resources than the current method of bookmarking. Immediately I can think of two important advantages. One is that because it is web-based, it is available to you anywhere you can access the Internet and the second is that you can share your tags with others without having to email them a link.

Another advantage is how the tags will help me retrieve bookmarked sites at the time I need them. So often I bookmark wonderful sites and think I’ll remember to get back to them months down the road when I’m ready to teach that unit. Guess what? It rarely happens. It’s not until the unit is over and I land on the site again by chance that I remember I wanted to use it. Not a very efficient way to use bookmarks!

I like the idea of creating a social network for bookmarks. Teachers are often isolated in their rooms while teaching during the day and do most of their research alone at night or on week-ends. Social bookmarking sites allow a certain degree of collaboration among teachers at their own time and place. I also like that you can see how others tagged the site. This could give you additional ideas for using the resource.

Tagging has the same disadvantages as Wikipedia. Anyone can add anything they wish. It would be necessary to evaluate each site to determine how well it meets your purposes.

I would be very careful recommending sites to students. It appears that Social Bookmarking sites have an even bigger disadvantage than Wikipedia in that no one attempts to monitor them. Hate groups often use key words to tag their sites to lure in unsuspecting researchers. These sites look and sound official until you read further into them. I believe that if I were going to use this technology with students I would create a separate account just for that purpose and only invite my students to participate. Is that possible? Also, it is possible to report inappropriate sites and who would determine what makes a site inappropriate? I see you can edit but can you delete tags and remove sites from your tags? Maybe I’ll find my answers in Thing 14.