Lunch and Learn #2 Social bookmarking
Last Tuesday we had an interesting and useful presentation by Brian Lamb from OLT sharing his expertise on social bookmarking. To summarize a few of his points of how social bookmarking is of importance to academics:
*social bookmarking provides users with a more reasonable way of managing their resources and favourites or bookmarks, through the use of tags (or keywords) and RSS feeds
*through the use of tags, it is easier for users to find other users with the same interests and focus.
*RSS feeds are basically a way of subscribing to multiple resources such as websites, academic journals, and weblogs, and then having them fed into one location, so that you don’t have to waste time remembering to visit and browse your favourite sites
-RSS feeds are useful in a course website, where you can have recent journal articles and academic papers fed into the course, without you having to update it yourself.
Although it’s simple to get started, it can be difficult to wrap your head around the new information. I suggest you start with Citeulike which is a social bookmarking tool that targets specifically the academic community. I’ve created a few screencasts to get you started–they are relatively small Quicktime movies, but to play them you will need to have a Quicktime plugin installed, which you can get from here. Note the the download for windows link at the bottom of the page.
*Citeulike Navigation is a quick intro to Citeulike and the main entry page
*Citeulike Watchlist gives you a quick overview of the RSS feature of this tool and how it works with ejournals
*Citeulike library explains how you would build and share your library of resources
There are other features that will appear in future screencasts, but this is all I had time for right now. Please note that they are a bit rough–I haven’t done any editing, and they are totally unscripted, and you might even find my voice a bit annoying (I do!).
If the lunch and learn peaked your interest, I’m hoping that these screencasts will get you going. If it’s still too daunting, feel free to contact me and we can go through it one on one.
