A Social Bookmarking Assignment

I am writing this as I fly from New Brunswick to Ontario to visit my family for 3 days. The sun is setting above a spectacular layer of puffy clouds that stretches as far as the eye can see. There are millions of them out there, merging with and layering on top of each other ….Suddenly, all I can picture in my head are words floating around in the clouds like the tag clouds that have been in my sights all this week while learning about and experimenting with social book marking in an attempt to organize and make sense of the hundreds of websites I navigate every week.

Reflection on the process of learning about the tool
Although there are many different types of social bookmarking sites out there to try, I decided to use Del.icio.us this week for several reasons. First, it was the site that pioneered tagging and coined the term ‘social bookmarking’. Second, since social bookmarking, like any other social networking web tool relies on the size of its community and participation for its success, I chose to go with the largest one out there. Setting up a page on Del.licio.us was remarkably easy. I didn’t even need to use an email address to register. I followed the clear and easy to read prompts and was able to import my 191 bookmarks within a few minutes. What I was a bit disgruntled with at first (but now love since I’ve seen how easy and quick it is to use) is that it changed the look and settings of my firefox toolbar to include the Delicious tag buttons. I was happy that all my imported bookmarks were saved as private by default, even though it took me a bit of time to sort through and change the settings of approximately half of them to public. Admittedly, it probably would have gone quicker if I had discovered the ‘bulk edit’ button sooner! Now that I have used the quick tag buttons, I have discovered that these are saved as public by default. What I am still not very happy about is that there is no option to only share a bookmark with specific people in my network, but I can see how this could be circumnavigated by using a very unusual ‘tag’ word. The biggest thing that I learned this week is that the most important part of using this method of organization is all in the tag. “Finding and connecting to relevant information is not done through the search; it’s done through the tag” (Richardson p. 96). This is taking me a little bit of getting used to. The first day I tried it, I gave up in frustration, feeling like a grumpy little Eeyore with a black cloud about my head (yes, with tags words swirling in it). I have become so accustomed to my own antiquated method of using folders and sub-folders; I really have to adjust to this new way of thinking and searching. I feel like I still have a lot to learn about and try in Delicious, and I am interested to see how I will feel about this tool later on in the semester after I’d had a better opportunity to build my network of people to share with.

Social bookmarking as a tool for my own personal learning
As I started to ‘tag away’ I found it really interesting to see just how eclectic my tastes and interests are. I had never given much thought to the variety of sites that I visit everyday and the tangents that I go off on when browsing the internet. This tool has certainly made me much more aware of this aspect. When I look at my ‘tag cloud’ that is posted on this blog, I can see a drawback to this tag-based system. As hard as I tried to use similar keywords, I still pluralized some of them accidentally and made a few spelling errors. Since there is no standard set of keywords, social bookmarking relies on a folksonomy, which is not a controlled vocabulary (Wikipedia). Besides making spelling errors, users could potentially use tags that have more than one meaning and further add a confusing element.

Despite this particular drawback and my own personal struggle with using a new system of organization, I am looking forward to building up my network to connect to others that share similar interests and hobbies. Rock climbing has long been one of my passions, and it will be fun to find others with which to share new route information and newly discovered areas to explore in. I also love to cook and bake, and am eager to find others to share recipes and helpful websites with.

It may be a coincidence that this tool was introduced to our class in the same week that we were asked to reflect on how we’re managing to stay organized in the Web 2.0 environment – but I doubt it! While reflecting on that question, and experimenting with social bookmarking, I started to wonder how this is changing the way we interact and communicate with others. I can also see that it may be changing the way we store and find information in general. By tagging information, resources, photos, videos etc., it “may become less important to know and remember where information was found and more important to know how to retrieve it”. (Educause Learning Initiative). This has lead me to question this week ‘Do my students not only communicate differently than I do, but actually think differently too?’ If this is the case, will I be able to change, adapt and evolve my own thinking too over time? Perhaps communicating in an online format is like any other skill – it needs to be practiced and developed to become inherent and effective. I am hoping that I become more comfortable with social bookmarking and the ‘tagging’ system over time.

Social bookmarking as a tool for teaching and learning
What intrigues me the most about social bookmarking sites are the possibilities that they hold to improve collaboration with colleagues, sharing of resources, and enhancing my teaching practice. As Richardson comments in School Library Journal it better “enables us to share our treasure with others”. I have often team taught my science classes with other teachers and we have always had to store our information, notes and presentations on a central laptop which we then wheeled on a cart from room to room as needed. I am happy that I now have a quicker, more efficient method of sharing valuable websites and information with colleagues. I am also excited that my bookmarks can now be utilized from any computer or workstation in the school or when traveling. I also feel more secure knowing that I can download and save all of my bookmarks for security, or easily transfer from one service to another if I find it better suits my needs later on (McGraw-Hill Ryerson).

I am also excited about the possibilities that social bookmarking has to help students organize themselves and work collaboratively with their peers and a bigger community.
Many of the teenagers that I teach in junior high really struggle with the transition of having several courses with different teachers and organizing themselves in general. Teaching students to use social bookmarking can provide them with an overall system or framework in which to organize themselves, but still allows them the flexibility to personalize their sites and form their own networks. Where I see bookmarking becoming invaluable to students is the collaboration and sharing of websites when researching for projects. If the time is taken to properly teach students how to critically evaluate websites when researching it could also mean that they will be more diligent about utilizing and sharing sites of higher quality. (DesRoches) It also has the potential for helping students find links to current events by subscribing to news feeds on a particular subject of interest (McGraw-Hill Ryerson).

In the library, there are several possible applications for social bookmarking that will dramatically change how we research and communicate. Using tailor made social bookmarks for a specific class research project can simplify the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies and resources between students or collaborative groups (Educause Learning Initiative). Teachers and students could also tag interesting reviews to recommend books and DVDs that be purchased for the library, or possibly used in book clubs (DesRoches). Some community libraries, like the Thunder Bay Public Library and the Nashville Public Library now have tag clouds rolled onto their websites so patrons can find information on any number of topics just by clicking on a tag. Researchers have noted that this has been better for patrons than traditional pathfinders and subject guides because it “lowers [the] barriers for participation”. (Rethlefsen)

After getting a ‘taste’ of Del.icio.us social bookmarking this week and seeing the benefits that it will offer both my students and myself personally and professionally, I am definitely going to go back for a second helping.

References

Educause Learning Initiative. (May 2005) 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking. Retrieved October 4, 2009 from http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf

Desroches, Donna. (January 2007) All Together Now. School Library Journal from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6403269.html

McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Social Bookmarking. Retrieved October 4, 2009 from http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/hoetoarticles/social-bookmarking.

Rethlefsen, Melissa. (June 2007). Tags help make Libraries Del.icio.us. Library Journal from http://login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/pqdweb?did=1335174171&sid=4&Fmt=3&clientId=12301&RQT=309&VName=PQD

Richardson, Will. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press

Social Boomarking. Retrieved October 4, 2009 from http://wikipedia.org/wiki/social_bookmarking

“Seeing is Believing”: A Video-sharing Assignment

Reflection on the process of learning about the tool

I am spending the next two weeks visiting my boyfriend’s family on the East coast of New Brunswick. Their house is located on the St. Croix river just a few kilometers from the Bay of Fundy. I have always heard about the extraordinary tides that are the largest in the world, but until I actually saw it with my own eyes, I found it difficult to really understand how amazing they really are. Yesterday, as we floated in our canoe looking at the astonishing array of fall colours along the bank, I couldn’t help but think about the other incidents in my life that left me speechless in their unique beauty; the rare sighting of Haley’s comet when I was a child; the exceptional and eerie beauty of the dancing and colourful Aurora Borealis; or the power of the Niagara Falls. There is no oral or written description that can describe the wonder of these phenomena as clearly as seeing it for oneself. That is the simple fact that makes video images such a powerful tool. Seeing is believing.

This is the premise behind YouTube, which was developed in 2005 by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, after a mutual friend, who had missed out on a dinner party, denied that it had ever taken place. They came up with the idea of posting videos for him to view to prove that the party had indeed happened without him (Wikipedia). I have long been a user of YouTube, but had never tried to post my own video before. The video that I chose to post was another rare instance that I was lucky enough to catch on my camera. I am an avid ice climber, and last December, when the temperatures dipped uncharacteristically low, I went out to Shannon Falls to see if the waterfall had frozen enough to climb it. What I saw that day is something that I will likely never see again – fast flowing water freezing before my eyes. This is a video I’ve shared with many friends and used in my classroom when taking about change of state

I am happy to say that the process for opening an account on YouTube and uploading my first video was as easy as floating in a canoe on a calm lake. It took less than 5 minutes to upload the video and approximately 10 minutes for the processing to take place so that it could be viewed by anyone. The straightforwardness and ease of this process was astonishing. There was no template to set up, or personal space being created. The video was simply ‘put out there’ for the masses to find. No wonder an “impressive 10 hours worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute”! (Davies and Merchant, p. 53)

I also played around on Teachertube.com for the first time. I was unaware that a special site geared towards educators even existed until I read about it this week in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (Richardson). What I liked about this site was that it not only provided a space for video-sharing, but it was also organized to share audio, photos, blogs and documents. It had less of a ‘marketplace’ feel and the homepage had a cleaner layout (with no advertising), providing easy links for teachers to follow updates on twitter, RSS feeds, daily emails or Facebook. However, I did have some difficulties on this site finding relevant videos. It became easier once I used a specific ‘channel’ for high school, but it simply doesn’t have the plenitude of videos that are available on YouTube. Hopefully, as this site becomes more known, it will attract more users that will in turn, upload more videos to be shared.

Video- sharing as a tool for my own personal learning

I must admit that for the two months this spring I was on crutches and couch-bound, I spent an inordinate amount of time ‘surfing’ the internet and watching YouTube. It was a lonely and frustrating period of healing and I didn’t have a TV, so watching videos on YouTube provided good entertainment for me as well as providing a social connection to the outside world. I like that the clips are short, often humorous and put up there by REAL people. It is like being able to watch “America’s Funniest Home Videos” anytime I choose.

Besides providing entertainment and a social connection, I have used many instructional “How To” videos on YouTube to learn how to sand floors or rewire my kitchen outlets for new appliances. I also regularly watch Avalanche Bulletins in the winter to stay informed on snow conditions in the mountains where I plan on skiing and ice-climbing.

Having seen how easy it is to upload a video, I am now far more likely to post videos of my ‘adventures’ so that family and friends can view them. I do have a few concerns about safety and would take care not to use my real surname, or mention the location that I live in. I would also be careful to get permission from anyone else featured in the video. Until I feel more comfortable with the masses viewing my video footage, I’m more likely to choose the option not to have it viewed by the general public but only by a list of friends or post it on my Facebook page rather than Youtube.

Video-sharing as a tool for teaching and learning

In their book Web 2.0 for schools, Davies and Merchant acknowledge that video-sharing websites “can be very useful for an educator, [but] its purpose is not to serve that community” (p.56). It is meant to be an open community that caters to a very diverse audience of all ages worldwide. The community is in control and determines what is popular on the site. YouTube does not view videos before they are posted online and it relies on users to flag the material as inappropriate (Wikipedia). This can be a cause for concern for educators. Despite their ‘copyright tips page’ and ‘community guidelines’ it has been noted that “there are still many unauthorized clips from television shows, films and music videos” (Wikipedia). What kind of message does it send out to our students when we are asking them to create authentic work and not plagiarize other peoples’ ideas, but they can easily see videos and music on YouTube that violates copyright? In its terms of service, YouTube also forbids the uploading of material that is likely to be considered inappropriate, but many schools, including my own, “have blocked access to YouTube due to students uploading videos of buying behavior, school fights, racist behavior and other inappropriate content” (Wikipedia)

Many school boards have effectively dammed the flow of ideas and possibilities that this video-sharing website could offer by blocking it altogether, and I think that this is a real shame. It is possible to portage around this obstruction and still access the content by posting a video into another web page outside the site (like a blog or class wiki). By doing this, a teacher can provide students the opportunity to discuss the video privately, as a class, and also surround it with other related materials on that subject (Davies and Merchant p.55). Another option that is less likely to be blocked is using SchoolTube or TeacherTube as a forum to post student work.

Personally, I find it far more satisfying and interesting to kayak down a class 4 river, than drift on a blow-up rubber air mattress on a flat lake. The difference being, one requires skill and proper instruction and the other requires no effort or learning opportunity. If children are going to go swimming, shouldn’t we teach them the skills they are going to need to avoid the riptides, currents, eddies and other dangers that are inherently found in water? In my opinion, the same holds true for students using the internet and in particular YouTube. I agree with the opinion that “as young people are accessing these sites anyway, we need to give them the critical skills to negotiate the spaces carefully” (Davis and Merchant p.68). This is an opportunity for learning that I feel too many administrators have shied away from, for it is cheaper and easier to post a “NO SWIMMING” sign than it is to provide proper swimming lessons and a trained lifeguard to monitor the activity.

In doing so, a powerful waterfall of possibilities has been shut down. Think of the engaging learning opportunities that video-sharing could generate from the following stream of classroom project ideas:
• Digital Storytelling (of novels or personal life stories)
• Learning objectives (like safety rules for chemistry labs or geometry tutorials)
• Promotions (for school or community events)
• Public Service Announcements (that give students the opportunity to share their knowledge of social issues like anti-smoking campaigns)
• Reenactments (of historical events)
• Documentaries (of social issues)

The possible uses within the library are also varied and include:
• Storehouse for instructional videos or tutorials to teach students (like how to use a library catalog, how to request a journal article, how to use library tools like the microfiche machine, or how to use archives and public records)
• Library welcome and orientation video
• Using the RSS feed to notify patrons of new content

My plan as an educator is to provide a safe video-sharing experience for my students. I will likely let them ‘wade in’ by introducing them to SchoolTube (or TeacherTube) or selected videos that I’ve downloaded from YouTube. However, I feel strongly that my students should be able to swim on their own by the time they are done high school and will try to teach them the skills that they need to navigate a site like YouTube properly and critically and swim with their eyes wide open.

References

Accredited Degrees Blog (June 18, 2008). 100 Awesome Youtube Vids for Librarians. Retrieved September 25, 2009 from http://www.accrediteddldegrees.com/2008/100-awesome-youtube-vids-for-librarians/

Davies, Julia. Merchant, Guy. (2009) Web 2.0 for Schools: Learning and Social Participation. New York, NY: Peter Lang

Lamb, Annette. Johnson, Larry. (2007). Video and the Web, Part 2: Sharing and Social Networking. Teacher Librarian. Seattle, WA. Vol 35(2)p. 55-60.

Richardson, Will. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press

Webb, Paula. (June 2007). YouTube and Libraries. Retrieved September 25, 2009 from http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crlnews/2007/jun/youtube.cfm

Youtube. Retrieved September 25, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube

Photosharing Assignment

Reflection on the process of learning about the tool

My colleagues laughingly refer to me as the “Organizational Queen” at our school. (I have to wonder if it is due to the handouts that are colour-coded with each chapter, the daily table of contents, or the date stamps on each lab assignment?) Oh, if only they could see my closet full of outdoor gear…or my photo collection for that matter! This week’s assignment to explore and experiment with various photo sharing programs had me cursing my lackadaisical attitude towards organizing my photos from the last 4 years. I literally have thousands of photos that I’ve simply downloaded off my camera and dumped into one big folder. From a personal perspective, I finally got the kick-in-the-pants I needed to arrange and exhibit some of them. It was a daunting task and it took FAR longer than I anticipated viewing, sorting, evaluating, editing and posting a sampling to this blog. However, it was not as arduous as I anticipated due to the amazing programs that are out there to use.

I started by looking at the class’ trail fire on photo-sharing and by reading the suggested chapters in Web 2.0 for Schools (Davies & Merchant), and Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson. I found that I learned the most however, by just diving in and experimenting with two different photo sharing programs. I started with Flickr since it was highly recommended in our readings this week. My single complaint with using Flickr is that I had to sign up for a Yahoo account to access it, bringing my number of (personal, work and school) email accounts to a grand total of six. (Does this not seem a little excessive to anyone else but me?) I then proceeded to try Picassa 3 since I already have a Google account registered. The two things that I really liked about Picassa was that the program automatically amalgamated every single photo and video that I had stored on my computer into the program, and arranged it according to date. This made it much quicker for me to choose which photos to upload since they were not pre-organized into folders. The physical time it took to upload the photos was also quicker on Picassa, though they were both fairly fast. I found both programs were relatively easy to use, but navigating Flickr was a bit more intuitive to me and the help section had a layout that was far more instructional and helpful than Picassa. I also feel that Flickr offers better security features, giving 19 settings to choose from, whereas Picassa only gave 3. It wasn’t until my photos were posted that I really started to have fun with the programs, investigating applications like Mappr, trip planning, annotating images and tagging them with keywords. I still have a lot of “playing” and learning to do with both programs before I decide which one to use personally and at work.

Photo- sharing as a tool for my own personal learning

I am extremely excited about the potential communication possibilities that photo-sharing has in store for me. I am the only member of my family living on the West coast, and only get to visit my family in Ontario once a year. Photo-sharing has some obvious advantages for me to keep in touch and literally see how quickly my niece and nephews are growing. I also like to travel a great deal, and being able to organize and exhibit photos for my family and travel companions to view quickly is a huge benefit. Using fun applications to map where photos were taken and adding annotations to explain them also makes it more entertaining and informative for the viewers as well as interactive if they choose to leave comments.

I wish I had made the discovery earlier about the photo-sharing programs’ ability to store and back-up images! I could have completely avoided the emotional “mini melt-down” I had last year when my computer literally got fried by a power surge in my science lab and I lost all the images I hadn’t gotten around to backing up.

Photo-sharing as a tool for teaching and learning

From a professional viewpoint, one of the greatest benefits that I can see from photo-sharing applications is a greater sense of community that this would bring to the students. I would love to incorporate more photos of my students and their work on our school website for them and their friends and family to view. As Richardson says in his book, “What better way to celebrate the good work that students do every day than by putting it online for all (or some) to see?” (p. 100).

I also strongly believe that using photo-sharing websites to view photos from all over the world would help students feel more engaged in their learning. In the book Guided Inquiry, Learning in the 21st Century it was noted that students have deeper personal learning when “the curriculum and the student’s world [are] closely aligned” (Kulthau, p.26). When students are given the opportunity to make connections to the “outside” or “real” world, they will become more emotionally involved and connected to what they are learning. Rather than simply reading a textbook about invasive species, a science class could view photos of the flora or fauna and use the Google Map application to view where they originated.

It has also been recognized for some time that “children learn through all their senses” (Kulthau, p.27) and that “technology has broadened the scope and variety of resources available for learning” (Kulthau, p.27). Having a greater variety of resources that are a combination of print and visual, like the photo-sharing applications, allows students to utilize various learning styles. I can envision the variety of projects students could create in an Art class using collages or slideshows or the digital storytelling that could take place in an English class when students post comments or have written conversations about different images they see.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, and the uses and applications for photo-sharing are as broad as they first appear, this could potentially be one of the most useful and powerful tools we could implement in schools.

References

Davies, Julia. Merchant, Guy. (2009) Web 2.0 for Schools: Learning and Social Participation. New York, NY: Peter Lang

Kuhlthau, Carol. Maniotes, Leslie. Caspari, Ann. (2007). Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited

Richardson, Will. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press