Exercise Three: Join a social-bookmarking service.
Social bookmarking is a variation of the popular practice of storing, organizing, and managing links to web pages that you want to remember and return to at a later date. In a social bookmarking system, web links are usually made public and shared with specific people through groups or networks. Moreover, since your links are stored on the Web as opposed to your computer, they are available through any computer connected to the Internet.
Social bookmarking sites typically encourage users to organize their bookmarks with tags, which are keywords or terms associated with the content of a linked page or site. Oftentimes, a particular linked page might be identified with multiple tags, which can lead to clustering related tags in an organizational scheme. Other features available through some social-bookmarking sites include RSS feeds or subscription services that allow you to become aware of new bookmarks that have been added to a network or group, highlighting and annotating bookmarked pages, and the ability to add comments to a bookmark.
Here are two social-bookmarking services popular among educators:
Delicious has been around for a number of years now and has a loyal following of users. Diigo appeared more recently with additional features like the ability to add highlights and annotations to linked pages and the ability to form groups. Diigo also now offers educator accounts that include features intended to serve the needs of K-12 educators. like the ability to create student accounts. Thus, you might be wondering "Which social bookmarking service should I join?" Watching the two following videos might help you make a decision.
Social Bookmarking with Delicious (by Liz Davis)
Introductory Video to Diigo
Once you decide which social bookmarking service to use, register on the site and install the necessary bookmaking buttons in your FireFox browser. (delicious buttons or diigo buttons).
Next, try doing a search on your chosen bookmarking site (delicious or diigo) using tags like "arted, artedu, artist, and arthistory) to see what others have bookmarked before you. If you see a site that you would like to revisit, try saving it in your bookmarks. Otherwise, find 2-3 sites on the Web you want to bookmark and practice doing so using your new socialmarking service.
Lastly, try searching your chosen bookmarking site for others who share similar interests. If you find someone on Delicious that you want to follow add them to your network. On Diigo, you would send a "friend request." Your other option with Diigo is to join a group like Elementary Art.
