Web 2.0 Social Bookmarking in the Faculty of Education

Web 2.0 continues to introduce new and exciting possibilities for educational applications. One of these highly popular possibilities is social bookmarking (with Delicious dot com as an example). This system introduces a powerful new way of working with the Internet. A typical social bookmarking system allows online storage and management of bookmarks that can be accessed anytime, anywhere, via any browser and any web-enabled device. Such system enables bookmarks to be tagged by user-defined key words. The social dimension of such a system enables sharing of bookmarks with others, as well as ranking and engaging in an extended dialogue around them. By digging through the social bookmarking space, a user can locate relevant bookmarks based not only on personal pursuit but also upon collective tags, specific user’s recommendations and popularity. Rather than acting alone, a user mobilizes collective intelligence of the community to locate useful bookmarks. Such system allows users to subscribe for information about new bookmarks by specific users and specific tags, and to save and manage these in their own personal space. In addition, such systems also integrate effectively across other Web 2.0 tools and it is possible to feed stuff to other places such as in blogs and wikis.

RISAL – Repository of interactive social assets for learning – is a social bookmarking system being developed in the Division of Information and Technology Studies of the Faculty of Education that incorporates a repository of digital assets to support teaching and learning. The system is designed with a view to facilitate and encourage informal sharing and collaboration of students with similar interests or learning foci across levels and programs. This form of learning support builds on and encourages the Web 2.0 culture of social networking and contribution of the individual to the community. In addition, the system is designed to incorporate compliance with Hong Kong's Copyright Ordinance (Creative Commons). The system is built using open source tools and enhancements are being made on the integration of more social networking features. Our further efforts will concentrate on exploring educationally effective implementation and integration with a suitable learning management system.

In this seminar we will present the RISAL – Repository of interactive social assets for learning, describe its features and discuss a spectrum of benefits that this system can offer to teaching and learning.

Please register at http://mis.cite.hku.hk/events/default.asp?eventid=SEM08/0018