Transcribers: Brand Secretarial (JB)

Resource sharing with social bookmarking

Robin Petterd

Using social bookmarking tools

I am Robin Petterd the acting team leader of the Art Craft and Design area at TAFE Tasmania. My teaching area is in our Design and Digital Media program which is a Certificate IV in Design and then students move into a Diploma. This is mainly a face-to-face program with lots of E-Learning supports.

The reason I moved to social bookmarking in my teaching practice was because the sort of area I work in, a lot of the resources and a lot of the learning experiences are actually online. So, essentially quite often we are encouraging the students to actually access websites, tutorials and take a proactive role with their own learning and to actually be focused on what’s available around them and social bookmarking allows this to be able to – from the teacher’s point of view – to be able to deliver those sorts of resources to the students really easily. It will allow for the students to be able to share resources that they find that may be useful for their peers as well.

We essentially use our social bookmarking tools right through the course. We introduced them fairly early on in the course. We use Del.icio.us and the RSS feed from Del.icio.us feed into multiple places actually. The first page that the students come into is WebCT and also the individual content pages in WebCT as well, so I have a tag that is called Tasdesigners and everything goes into that first page in WebCT and then another, say called Tasdesigners, and then I use Web Design and then that feeds into a page of WebCT where there are all the Web Design resources. Essentially what is happening is as I’m going around I’m surfing the Net and when I find a resource that I think is really useful for the students – I’ll actually bookmark that – that will show up into WebCT. Sometimes that will actually form something that actually happens during the face-to-face session. The students are also, as they are going around, finding things. They are actually also bookmarking and using that Tasdesigners code as well, so sometimes you will find they are coming into WebCT and go to access a bookmark that I have put in there to do something, because the students find that there are other things that the students have bookmarked as well that are showing up in there.

For me, these sorts of tools really sit in the background of my teaching practice in the learning and its part of the ecology that the students are in. It is part of what they are sort of experiencing. They are experiencing Web 2.0 technologies while thinking about designing for the web. It’s about making sure that they’ve experienced some of those things because not all the students have.

I think the sort of skills that the students get out of being involved in Web 2.0 technologies are really skills about being able to learn, about being able to engage with communities, to be able to build their own knowledge in their own way. I had a really interesting discussion with a group of multimedia teachers one day, and it was about sharing of resources. They sat there and said, ‘Well, in actual fact in terms of our own professional practice and knowledge, there are lots of communities we go to that we take information from and we also give that information back in terms of if there is a question that happened in a forum that we know the answer to, then we respond.’ So introducing the students to these web communities gives them a chance to be able to start to think about how they actually work, web technologies and work to develop knowledge and network in the workplace.

Building a folksonomy and community of users

Essentially the students have a fairly free range of what they can actually add and tag and add into the system. As soon as they add something to the Tasdesigners tag it starts showing up in the RSS feeds that I use. What I sometimes do find is the students will use different tags from the ones I’ve used. We haven’t actually had a lot of agreement about, as a group, about what tags we use for different things. Some of those really interesting things they come very naturally so if someone finds a tutorial they’ll tag some of the good tutorials. Some of those things don’t even need to be talked about, but sometimes students will find they have to do a web design but they won’t actually tag it as ‘web design’. There is actually another teacher that uses the same tag as well but in actual fact, her resources feed into that same spot as well, and she’s a print design teacher rather than multimedia design teacher – and she’s actually found it a really valuable way of sharing information and encouraging the students to look around for things.

Essentially, the groups that are accessing this are two groups really – they work across different areas with different teachers.

In terms of the tagging and what tags the students use I’ll just let that happen in a very organic way rather than trying to control it. It’s possibly just my general philosophy with working with some of these things that you actually just let them grow rather than try to fence them in and put structures around them, because students will naturally use them the way – what I’ve learned – is that students will naturally use technology the way they want to use it, which is sometimes quite different to the way that teachers want to use it.

Moving from ‘closed’ to ‘open’ spaces

In terms of introducing this as a tool to the students, I really had to consider the fact that my students have a range of different experiences. Some of them are very web-savvy and some of them are less web-savvy. Some of them have engaged with tagging through YouTube or other social networking software and they might not have engaged with social bookmarking as such, so it is about trying to relate the social bookmarking to their other experiences of tagging, Web 2.0 and categorising and trying to actually introduce (it) as part of the general introduction to a learner-centred approach and then having control over places like WebCT as well, whereas in actual fact it’s a space that’s normally a space that teachers really control.

One of the interesting experiences recently was showing another teacher my WebCT stuff as I was handing over the teaching and the teacher turned around and said, ‘So, the students can change this?’ I said, ‘No, they can’t actually change the content’ and his expectation was in actual fact that he would’ve thought the students would have been able to change the content, and really the only place that students can, on that sort of closed environment, is through the RSS feed so it’s one of the few spots where they actually have control over that. Those sorts of things to do with control and space and students changing spaces, are things I am considering really changing in my teaching practice and moving away from those sorts of closed things like WebCT to more sort of wiki spaces and trying to build those communities in different ways. That notion of moving away from an LMS is actually almost not to do with a philosophy or a teaching philosophy; it is actually to do with how I’m seeing the students starting to want to work, rather than my own philosophy. I can actually see the advantages of the Learning Management System and I can see the advantages of the open spaces as well.

In terms of the technical uptake and the technical barriers – things like social bookmarking and Del.icio.us – I’m actually always really surprised about how complex students see it as; the whole process of everyone making a user account and going through the process and the abstract thing when someone tags things and then they will show up in another spot. It’s a session that I run face-to-face and its interesting how there’s always hurdles to that. Students seem to also then have hurdles and have problems when they try to then go home and install things like Firefox extensions on their machines and do the same things they may have done on campus, but those things are actually a lot more complex than what they possibly should be. There is a barrier and there is an IT barrier to it and my students are fairly IT literate but one of those times when they say, ‘Oh, this is actually really complex’. It’s one of those things that once you’ve got it set up its deadly simple.

I’ve really found with students with the resources that they tag, I’m actually always really surprised by the level of the quality of it. They actually want to tag and want to share. I think it’s partly they still see the tagging space very much as a TAFE space, as a sort of professional space. So, if they’ve got more funny videos on YouTube that they want to share around, they don’t actually use the social bookmarking system to do that.They actually might use ‘chat’ or mail systems to do that, rather than the social bookmarking. So they seem then to have a set of discretionary things at that place where they are in and make quite a strong professional barrier around it, professional judgement.