Response to Richardson Chapter 6: The Social Web

March 1, 2010 Aboyd20

Although in my previous post, I discussed how social networking tools such as facebook would be beneficial in an academic setting there are countless other ways to network socially on the web as well. After reading chapter six in the textbook, I realized how easy finding sources and researching has become. Sites as Delicious and Diigo have the ability to place sources at our fingertips in an instance. When searching about information on a specific topic, it can sometimes become a tedious tasks yet with the help of sites like these- fear no more! Once you have created an account you are able to bookmark and tag sites you find helpful and then share these with others. The example in the text kept referring to Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps in a classroom, the students would all find sites they believe relevant for their topic surrounding Romeo and Juliet and all they simply have to do is bookmark the site and tag it to enable others to find and link up to the site. This would certainly make tracking down resources simpler for students and teachers alike.

These tools have many other benefits as well, such as not just bookmarking the link but the content as well. So if you have bookmarked the link and the creator decides to take it down for instance you would still have the information. Also, according to the text, if you are using sites such as Diigo then you would have access to the information anytime at any computer. This would be helpful in any setting because you wouldn’t have to worry about saving it to a specific computer or file. This prevents the student excuse of “my computer crashed” and things of that nature.

Sites like these will also enable educators to close the gap between each other as well. For example, teachers teaching the same  material no longer have to in the same school to share materials or websites that have specific activites. Now all teachers have to do is create and account and search according to common tags people place on their bookmarked sites. Talk about a huge stress reliever!

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