Following the Bread Crumb Trail (Love You Forever, Part 3)

Tags or metadata become the bread crumbs to follow back to original sources of information on the internet. Rather than following a taxonomy created by others, an individual can create their own system of tags (called a folksonomy). I watched an interesting panel discussion from 2005 in which people from Delicious, Flickr, and Wikipedia (Butterfield, Shirkey, and Wales in picture) discussed their evolving use of tags and their sharing of the power with the public.

What are some of the implications for teaching and learning as we use social bookmarking sites? First of all, these sites can help teachers to better organize their favourite sites on the internet. Part of this will be learning how to create more useful tags. One of the issues there is with the use of multiple word tags which at the present time is handled is a variety of ways. For example a tag such as Saskatoon history could be typed as Saskatoonhistory, Saskatoon_history or Saskatoon-history. If there is no common way of creating this tag, people using a different typing, would not find all of the links to information.

We need to teach students to create tags and to use to tags to uncover information. Using tags for searching is better than using Google since Google returns results based on the popularity of a site not upon the reliability of information at that site.

A class account may be set up for students to save their sites along with tags so that others in the class may access those sites. For example, if a grade 5 class at Caroline Robins School was tagging and saving sites about the ocean, they could include CaroRob5 in each tag. Then everyone in the class could find all of the sites tagged in this manner.

Students will need to be able to skim and scan information on websites to find good sites. This will be a reading skill that will need to be modelled and taught explicitly. As well, students will need to learn to develop good tags or metadata for information. I believe that using concept maps will help in this learning. (Concept map templates) One author (DesRoches, 2007) suggested that developing the skill of social bookmarking should be part of the technology skills continuum which should be taught in grade 9.

One last way in which social bookmarking could benefit teacher-librarians is in their collaborative work with classroom teachers. As teacher and teach-librarian sit down to plan units and uncover resources, they could decide on common tags for information. Then they could save resources in Delicious or some other social bookmarking site. This would make sharing of those resources and return to those sources much easier.

I have learned a lot about social bookmarking over the past few days. Now I just have to figure out how to retroactively tag the sites which I moved over from Favourites into Delicious. Then I will really be able to make this aspect of technology work for me.

References:
Schachter, J., Butterfield, S., Wales, J., & Shirky, C. (2005) Folksonomy: How I learned to stop worrying and love the mess. Panel discussion recorded at the O'Reilly Media Emerging Technology Conference. http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail464.html

DesRoches, D. (2007). All together now: Social bookmarking offers a new way to store and share web sites. Online in School Library Journal.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6403269.html

I'll Love You Forever

Robert Munsch and his wife had two stillborn babies in 1979 and 1980. (You Tube video, You Tube video) Robert wrote the song I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, As long as I'm living, My baby you'll be. (Robert and his wife later adopted three children.) In 1986, Robert made the song into a book. In 1987, when my first child, Stephen, was born, I received that book as a gift.

Everytime I read Love You Forever, I cry. Over the years the story has come to mean more and more to me. Most people who know the book say it also brings them to tears. I believe it is because this book came out of Robert's grief and longing for his two little ones.

Six years ago, my cousin and his wife in Ottawa were expecting their first child. I purchased Love You Forever for them. I was visiting in Ottawa with my Dad (who was 80 years old at the time). Since my Dad, aunt, and uncle, had never heard the story, we sat together so I could read the book to them. My aunt was laying in a hospital bed in the living room because of a massive stroke. As I read the story, the circle of life and family was so evident. My uncle and his children were tenderly caring for my aunt. Their only son was having a child after many years of marriage. I began to cry and handed the book to my Dad to continue reading. After a few pages, he could not continue and handed the book back to me. Wow! What a special moment!

This spring when I knew that my Dad was very ill, I was leaving school to go to Regina to be with him. I had a image of myself cradling my Dad in my arms just as the grown son in Love You Forever cradles his Mom in his arms. I softly sang the song as I walked home that day. I had the privilege of being with my Dad on May 8th, singing In the Sweet By and By, and holding his hand as he left this world for "the beautiful shore". I'll love you forever, Dad.

Now, what does this have to do with social bookmarking you ask? Well, here's the thing--I love my favourites and my bookmarks. On any classroom computer or home computer I have used, I have files and lists of bookmarks. I have them organized by subject and then by topic under the subject. I love those sites forever. Or I would like to but . . . you know what happens when you no longer have access to that computer--your favourites are gone, finito, history. It makes me so mad. Don't they know how long it took me to collect all those sites in the first place? I would beg our IT people to help me save my favourites somehow. The best they could do was some kind of a Word document which did not work very well.

A week ago, my brother-in-law told me about Delicious. I was so excited because once again I am leaving behind my classroom computer stuffed full of Favourites. Next year I will be at university full-time. So if there is a way for me to keep all those well-loved computer sites, I will be thrilled. I will truly be able to Love Them Forever (or at least until their URL ceases to work).