Raw Sugar and Social Bookmarking
The start of school frenzy has put me a bit behind in my blog reading and writing. So, here's a link to a post by Bryan Alexander from earlier this month on the MANE IT Network Blog about Raw Sugar. Raw Sugar is another social bookmarking tool like del.icio.us with some added features that definitely makes it more appealing. (You can even import your del.icio.us bookmarks into it.)
If you haven't tried, social bookmarking, you should. At first, I didn't get what the big deal was... on the surface it doesn't sound all that exciting. But once I got started, I began to see the appeal of being able to access and update my bookmarks quickly and easily from anywhere, while also collaboratively combing the net for resources with others.
I wonder a bit about whether social bookmarking has any pedagogical potential. It seems like it should be a nice quick and easy way for students to share resources on a topic -- especially for group projects. But now that we are using RefWorks (which can be used to serve a similar function for all kinds of sources, not just web sites) would there ever be a need for a social bookmarking tool?
posted by Scott Hamlin @ 11:56 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your comment.
I think it would be really interesting if there was a way to export stuff from a social bookmarking service into RefWorks, and I think doing it via a tag or combinations of tags would be the right way to go.
Social bookmarking tools are much better than RefWorks when it comes to quickly stashing resources you find on the web (via bookmarklets and tags -- both unavailable in RefWorks). But when it comes time to write a paper and/or prepare a bibliography, having everything in RefWorks makes life much easier for students/researchers. This is because the online RefWorks database that students set up can be integrated with Microsoft Word to generate correctly formatted citations and bibliographies.
FYI, at Wheaton College we used to use EndNote as our bibliographic software, but switched to RefWorks because of the growing interest in creating collaborative bibliographies -- something not easily done in EndNote, which is really geared toward solitary researchers. So anything that would help our students be more collaborative in their research is what we are looking for.
At any rate, I just took a look at blinklist, and it looks like you are on your way to having a slick site there. I'll have to give it a try. Just to give you a head's up: It's not immediately apparent to me how it differs from other similar services. I can see why I should switch to something like Raw Sugar (because of the ability to import bookmarks and because your most popular tags are highlighted at the top of your list). So, why should a user switch from del.icio.us to blinklist? I'm sure there are reasons, but it'd be great if you could highlight them on your site somewhere.
Cheers!
Scott
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