Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

You know how much I love social bookmarking; however, I’m beginning to think I might start having my writing students use various social annotating sites instead. The difference?

• Social Bookmarking: bookmarks page, allows annotation, allows tagging, allows various social forms of sharing
• Social Annotating: everything above plus clipping text, images, videos, etc. from the pages being bookmarked

Over the past academic year I have converted–yes, as in “praise be” converted–to the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. I loved how “social” del.icio.us is. It is possible to make connections to other resources, other people, through tagging, sharing, subscribing, networking, etc.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been playing with various social annotating tools. The difference? Not much, they just make it much easier to “clip” copy and images from webpages and take notes on the site. I also like that they allow you to word search both the text you clipped as well as your notes.

Some of these social annotation tools include:

• Stickies
• Clipmarks
• Google Notebook

And Google Notebook, of course, will easily transfer materials to gmail or google docs.

I’m sure some of my colleagues would be unhappy that these programs promote blatant copying from the webpages; however, its the same thing as highlighting and annotating on a hardcopy. I think this tool, paired up with something like Turnitin.com,  will give instructors great tools to help teach students to summarize, paraphrase, and cite sources.