Thursday, October 25, 2007

Social bookmarking

Went to an interesting session about academic applications of social bookmarking tools, focusing primarily on the use of Bb Scholar. Nothing deep or complicated but some great examples of actual practice including:
  • staff pushing recommended readings to students (shock, horror!!)
  • assignments that require finding, evaluating and sharing resources (including "find and share", "find and validate", "find and annotate")
  • linked assignments that then require drawing on all shared resources
  • groups build themed resource channels (eg was interdisciplinary medieval studies focusing on Arthurian legend)
  • put together collections that from the basis for discussion and exercises re "good and bad" resources
  • improve personal productivity (students and staff) by encouraging strong organisational skills
  • as a way for sharing/building CPD resources to staff for their own professional development
  • use for document flow and resource management for teamwork, committees and accreditation (validation) planning

Some interesting discussions about how some of the eg activities might be assessed....and the answer? well, there was that word again.....authenticity

6 comments:

Angie Donoghue said...

We're working on it!!

Louise said...

Hi - I didn't mean we didn't have any actual practice (I share your pain on that one) - it was just nice to go to something (especially so early in the morning) that didn't try deep and meaningful but rather was a string of "we did this", "they did that" etc

Kay said...

Sounds very like the approach we are using with Early Childhood Studies but they are using a wiki rather than social bookmarking - finding/evaluating/sharing and validating the resources - would like to know a bit more about the assessment approaches though - anything more to report on this?

Brian said...

Did they have any comment about what things worked best out of what they tried? It has seemed to us that Scholar does some things well, and other things quite poorly.

Louise said...

I think that the "quick find" stuff worked very well for orientation activities and were assessed just on numbers of resources shared and the appropriateness of the ones selected. Most of the assessments that required annotation or validation there were lesser marks for selection and sharing and more for the quality of the analysis of the resource - synopsis of content, what makes it a good resource, other observations.

Personally, I thought the group projects worked particularly well - giving a topic to a group and getting them to populate a resource channel on that topic - particularly the inter-disciplinary resources.

The workflow stuff surprised me and reminded me of the early days of e-learning@shu where staff started using Bb orgs to plan validations - not pushed as a use case but people finding something that more or less meets their needs and that is easy to use etc.

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