What this post is about is how social bookmarking, or social scholarship more generally, can create educational opportunities for both students and teachers.
Christine Greenhow (2009) suggested that teachers can use the collaborative power of sites like Delicious to share resources on best practices and share research sources discovered during professional development opportunities. Such a process would encourage and develop a "scholarly approach to teaching" where the collected knowledge and wisdom could be not only saved for each teacher's future use, but shared with her colleagues across the world (p. 11).
So what about that research paper? Don't students need to analyze, organize, and synthesize? Sure they do. But perhaps there are other avenues to the competency than through the same old product. I don't know any teacher who thinks knowing how to do a research paper is the primary skill or competency that comes from completing a research paper. Teachers talk about ordering information from most relevant to least, about analyzing information for its reliability, organizing information into meaningful chunks and in a meaningful order.
Guess when else students are doing those things? While they are tagging. When students tag an item in a social bookmarking (or other technologically mediated) setting, they are getting to the essence of the resource. Cosimo Cannata (2009) suggested that students are affectively engaged in internet tools, and especially with tools, like social bookmarking sites, that encourage tagging (p.29).
The claim is not that tagging will or should replace the entire research paper process, but teachers might find students more willing to engage with the resources from a perspective of social tagging, rather than through the perspective of the "official library subject headings." The Ann Arbor District Library (Michigan) incorporated user tagging into its collection listings in order to provide descriptors that make more sense to the local consumers (Rethlefsen, 2007). The following example demonstrates the tags feature in the bottom left corner of the image.
The implication of all of the above is that students are more likely to engage in tagged resources, and enjoy participating using tools that are dynamic, interactive, and provide some sense of personal engagement. Tagging allows students some element of input, and thereby, some sense of ownership. Tagging allows students to arrange information into categories that make sense within their own world.
Students think critically during this process; they analyze; they compare and contrast; they reduce ideas to their essence. Aren't these the competencies we hope they get from the process of writing a research paper? Maybe it is time, after all, to bury the old boy.
Cannata, C. (2009). Folksonomy, tagging, and taxonomy for effective learning: Perspectives of learning 2.0 in the XXIst century. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 4(2), 26-32. doi:10.3991/ijet.v4i2.657
Greenhow, C. (2009) Tapping the wealth of social networks for professional development. Learning and Leading with Technology, 36(8), 10-11. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ842796&site=ehost-live
Rethlefsen, M. (2007). Tags help make libraries Del.icio.us. Library Journal, 132(15), 26-28. Retreived from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=26692224&site=ehost-live
"I don't know any teacher who thinks knowing how to do a research paper is the primary skill or competency that comes from completing a research paper." This is very interesting. We need to have people who are willing to go against the grain. Incredible job on this post:)
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