Monday, March 31, 2008

Social Networking & Education: An Annotated Bibliography

The following is one of my annotated bibliography entries for research I have been doing on this topic. There is a lot of material on the internet on this topic (not surprising) but I found this author and site very useful. Read on...

Criddle, L. (2008). Look Both Ways: Online Safety Consulting. Retrieved March 25, 2008, from
http://look-both-ways.com/default.aspx

The author, Linda Criddle, is an internationally recognized speaker and advisor on child safety and the internet, owns a consulting company and has written a book on the topic. She appears to be a very experienced and credible resource on the topic. Her website offers consulting advice, excerpts from her book as well as links to websites that offer other support for the reader. The intended audience for her book and services are administrators, teachers, and parents of internet users. Her work on this website is exceptional. The website offers bullet-point highlights of different topics of which she advises as well as offers links to sites that the reader would find useful. Certainly, there are risks involved in exposing students to the internet, let alone social networking sites. Criddle’s work offers educators direction on both proactive steps to take as well as on what to do in the event that some type of threat occurs. I would consider her work a must read for educators involving their school and students in social networking.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Social Bookmarking

As part of my course, I have been investigating and participating in social bookmarking. This has been an interesting experience. I have considered myself to be fairly up to date with the workings of the Internet and what it has to offer. However, this has opened my eyes to a whole new avenue of information gathering and entertainment. Social Bookmarking allows you to make public a list of websites that you have found interesting. Further, you have the ability to tag each bookmark with key terms. These tags can then be used as a type of search engine for other people to find websites that include these tags. Likewise, you are able to search other peoples tags and websites listed.

This is a great tool for researching a particular topic. I was able to quickly find a list of websites that other people have found useful to them. It saves time of sorting through useless sites when doing research. Also, it is a useful collaboration tool. In this course, we are doing a group research/presentation project. My partner and myself have the ability to easily share websites we found useful in our research. This is like a new vein of the 'information superhighway'. It is like finding someones old highlighted road map with notations on it when you are going on a similar trip. This will prove to be useful when navigating a continually expanding Internet.

Another factor I found with social bookmarking is a sense of snooping. It feels a little invasive to be sorting through other peoples bookmarks, even though I know they are aware of it. I found myself getting off on tangents finding interesting bookmarks that were off topic. It is like learning about people by sorting through their personal items. Even with the understanding of the purpose of the tool, I still had this feeling of invading peoples privacy. I imagine this sensation will go away as I use this more often. Until then, I'll continue to be a snoop.