Like many others, I am obliged to use an institutional VLE (in my case Blackboard) but get frustrated with updates being cumbersome and bookmarks being duplicated in the silos that are my Blackboard 'courses'.
I now manage links in del.icio.us and simply link to the appropriate tag from the relevant area of my Blackboard course, as you can see in this image.
The steps are as follows
1. I organise the resources by syllabus topic so I choose a tag that relates to that topic, in this case information-systems-context, adding other tags as appropriate, http://del.icio.us/francesbell/information-systems-context
2. I then create a link to this in Blackboard. As I add resources to del.icio.us, these become available in Blackboard.
3. It is possible to enrol students in collaborative tagging by linking to the tag in general, rather than just in your own tags, e.g. http://del.icio.us/tag/information-systems-context . That way, students can contribute their own links for the benefit of the group.
I am very interested to hear how others use social bookmarking in conjunction with traditional learning environments.
P.S.
Liz Bennett asked me about this so I thought I would post it rather than hiding it in an email. I am sure this is something that lots of people do and maybe they can contribute additional ideas.
Keywords: Blackboard, silos, social bookmarking, tipsntricks
Comments
Thanks Helen,
It's quite interesting to think of the different ways we do this, the first and most obvious being including external web links in our resources. I guess that Web 2.0 offers more chances to manage this but unfortunately more things to manage. My current thinking is What can I safely and legitimately expose from my hard disk? so I have started to put diagrams in a Flickr set, bookmarks in del.icio.us tags and slide shows on slideshare. At least that way, I know where they are!