Social Bookmarking and Instructional Design and Technology

This week our class assignment brought me into the foray of Social Bookmarking, and the concept of ‘Folksonomy’ otherwise known as “social tagging”.  The idea is to use a site such as Delicious to store your bookmarks online and then ‘tag’ each bookmark with a set of descriptive terms that you can then use to organize them for later use based on subject, author, or whatever the ‘tag’ represents to you.  One could draw a Venn diagram to show how some bookmarks may overlap with others or remain unique via the tags used to describe them. I’m guessing that is where the term folksonomy comes from, sort of an undisciplined folk-taxonomy that grows in an organic sort of way.  By using the tags, you are able to search other websites and resources that have been tagged with the same terms by other users, and therefore obtain the social portion of the concept.

 I spent quite a bit of time putting the bookmarks from one of the computers I use into my newly created delicious account at:  http://delicious.com/jameskison    and I have to say that the process does tame the unmanageable pages of bookmarks.  It’s nice to have my bookmarks available on the cloud and organized by subject.  In the past I have used a cloud book-marking site: mybookmarks , however my account fell into disuse because I live in a rural location.  I did not have access to the internet beyond a dial-up connection, so the idea was more difficult to use in practice than it was in theory.  I have since forgotten my log in, and also no longer have the email account that I created the profile with as that company went out of business.  It’s safe to say that those bookmarks are now lost to me, though in truth I’m not worried as many of them were to yahoo, angelfire, and xoom.com 'free' personal homepages which I’m sure the vast majority have gone the way of the dodo.   The other downside of that site was the bookmarks were arranged in folders, not by tags, so cross-referencing or overlap in organization was not easily accomplished.

I can see Social Bookmarking being valuable to teachers by facilitating the collaboration amongst peers in terms of sharing resources.  This will be easier in fields where discipline-specific jargon can be used to tag, as these very specific terms can cut through the static of a wealth of information.  The learned folks on the edge of research then can review and rank each others resources by adopting them as their own. The user data can then be analyzed for trends to lead newcomers to the best materials.   One would expect the students to benefit from teachers who hold a greater knowledge base. 

Students could also use the tool to tag and track their own research amongst a cohort of their classmates.  The teacher could then see amongst the class which resources were trending in popularity, and perhaps even pick out a few that required a little extra digging to show the value of persistence to the class.

All of this goodness comes at a price, and I have a concern that there is an unrealized dark side lurking.  I can’t qualify the uneasy feeling beyond just waiting for the other shoe to drop.  At the heart of my concern lies this quote:  “If you are not paying for it, you are the product”.  Google, Facebook, Amazon and others have quietly been tracking user info for some time now.  Could it be sinister? Well, yes, but more likely it will result in targeted marketing of goods and services I actually want.  Perhaps that’s not entirely a bad thing considering the spam I regularly wade through in my inbox.  I might even welcome offers that I’m truly interested in.  My bigger concern is the protection of the students who are in our charge.  Beyond the obvious privacy issues of FERPA, I don’t like the idea of K-12 students being data-mining guinea pigs, and am distrustful of services that claim to do one thing, but could be subtlety influencing impressionable minds in the classroom.  They get enough of that sort of thing from TV and internets ads, or simply walking around the mall.    

I’m not sure how I fit within the various definitions in Chapter 1 of the text, but a big part of that is I haven’t really decided on my future path.  I have multiple computer skills and the field of education appeals to my heart.  It’s something I can get up in the morning and feel good about; my life has purpose beyond making the rent.  My career direction at the moment is directed toward supporting and facilitating the educator.  That is to say, I’m not interested in being a traditional classroom teacher, but rather want to be the person behind the scenes who makes teaching easier and more interesting for the teachers and students via support technology.  The duties would be anywhere from: reviewing software and hardware solutions, to installation and repair of equipment, to updating and maintaining the servers that handle grades and payroll.  I have a feeling that before I’m done, I’ll have a good handle on integrating technology into the curriculum of the classroom as well.  I’m currently in a higher education setting and love it, but I wouldn’t mind working in a smaller K-12 environment.

The portion of the text that made the case for Instructional Design and Technology vs. just Instructional Technology came into play for me on a personal level this evening as I was talking to my Dad on the phone.  It seems that he misheard/misunderstood me a few months back when I announced that I was going to graduate school, and thought I had said that my wife was pursuing a Master’s degree.  When I explained that it was I who was attending, he asked what I was studying.  After I answered that I was enrolled in the Educational Technology program he said “oh, … computers”.   Ok, sure.  In a word, I am studying computers.  Sometimes it’s just easier to let it be.  Though to be fair, a couple of years ago if someone had said the same to me, it would probably have just registered as ‘computers’.