Social Bookmarking, Tagging, and ...

Maybe I am not in a very social mood this week, or maybe I am not a very social person on the whole. Maybe it's nearly the end of the school year (where I teach, that is) and maybe I am just tired of spending so much time tied to a computer. . . whatever the symptoms or diagnosis, I am wary of all this socializing and tagging!!

I watched the "Tagging 101" video and was satisfied. Mr. Morton made tagging seem so easy. I will keep this to show to the teachers who may have questions about it. Then, I started thinking about tagging and its implication for researching in the physical library, not on-line, and realized that teaching things like keywords and subjects may have to be altered at some point. If tagging allows our students to tag as they see fit, when they search in the library, I can see them doing it in the same manner. I can see them making connections and searching for materials under what they see as appropriate headings. I know that we would like to think that they would confine tagging to the online world, but I don't think they will. As tagging becomes more mainstream we will have to address it in our physical space also. And, for a generation that never truly embraced Dewey, we may have our work cut out for us.

Now, for social bookmarking!! Many people are touting the positive implications of social bookmarking for educational purposes. But, let's not forget the other side of the argument. There are pitfalls to be wary of and one that I want to draw attention to is the difference between "information availability" versus "information literacy."

Exposing students to large quantities of information does not mean that they are going to become information literate. These social bookmarking sites offer links to information upon information. When I logged on to del.icio.us and searched under some tags, I was overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. I do not know how much of it, if any, is checked for legitimacy, but it's out there. How will students know the difference? How much is too much? Will they know/understand exactly what they are looking at? Do I have the time and manpower to help them sift through all this information? How much different is this from logging on to Google's search engine?

As our professors pointed out in this week's module, setting up and maintaining these bookmarks and tags takes time. . . lots of time from what I see! Who has the time? Do we need all this in the educational setting at the K-12 level?

In the Educause article, "7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking," (http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf) it says that since social bookmarking "reflects the values of community of users, there is a risk of presenting a skewed view of the value of a particular topic." That risk is something, we educators, must be careful about. Because there are no "filtering agents," per se, for these communities, we have to keep our guards up at all times. We do not want to lead our students to information that could be wrong, misleading, and detrimental to their academic lives.

After viewing some of the sites, I still have some questions about their educational potential. I see their voyeuristic value--I can look at other people's lives from the shadows--but I would be very careful about using them with students at the K-12 level.