INTEGRATING SOCIAL BOOKMARKING TOOLS INTO COLLEGE COURSES: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGESDecember 2, 2008IntroductionThe Benefits of Using a Social Bookmarking Tool in College and University CoursesSystem Requirements for an Educational Social Bookmarking SystemMotivating Students to Use the Social Bookmarking SystemSuggestions for Incorporating the Tool in a College CourseConclusionReferencesIantha M. HaightINF 385TINTEGRATING SOCIAL BOOKMARKING TOOLS INTO COLLEGE COURSES: OPPORTUNITIES ANDCHALLENGESINF 385TTHE SEMANTIC WEBDr. Don TurnbullFall 2008Iantha M. HaightSchool of InformationUniversity of Texas at AustinDecember 2, 20080Iantha M. HaightINF 385TIntroductionSocial bookmarking applications, with del.icio.us being the most popular, have changed the way many people find and organize information on the Web. (Pan & Millen, 2008). Some businesses, notably IBM, have attempted to incorporate social bookmarking systems into their enterprise software. (Pan & Millen, 2008). Millen, Yang, Whittaker, and Feinberg (2007) reported that a social bookmarking application at IBM helped employees’ improve their exploratory search, organize their personal bookmarks, and find others with similar interests and projects. Librarians have also used social bookmarking sites to quickly and easily organize usefulWeb resources for patrons. (Rethlefsen, 2007). If social bookmarking applications can assist corporate employees and librarians, can they also provide value for students and instructors of college and university courses? There certainly are many potential benefits that could come from the successful incorporation of a social bookmarking application in the classroom. A well-designed social bookmarking tool can encourage and assist students in developing critical research skills, help students develop a habit of keeping up on developments in their fields of study, and teach collaboration skills. A social bookmarking tool can help instructors and teaching assistants be aware of students’ interests, strengths, and weaknesses, and provide a method for collaborating with library instruction faculty.While there are many potential benefits for the use of a social bookmarking tool in the classroom, there are many barriers to the successful incorporation of a social bookmarking tool in a college or university course. The classroom environment is very different from a workplace environment. Librarians and corporate employees in general likely have more self-motivation to keep up with research pertaining to their work than students. Many students may only be taking aparticular class because the university requires the course for graduation, and some of these students try to pass their required courses with the minimum effort necessary. Other students maybe motivated to learn, but they cannot devote the time they need to a course because they are juggling a busy schedule of employment, other courses, and social activities. Students who are too busy or too apathetic may only utilize the bookmarking tool in a perfunctory way that gives them no benefit. The challenges are not only on the student side, however. Many instructors will be wary of using a novel application without a proven track record of success. Some instructors are not comfortable with new technology and prefer traditional pedagogical methods. Still other 1Iantha M. HaightINF 385Tinstructors may want the benefits of a social bookmarking application in their classes, but they are unsure how to incorporate the tool into the course assignments.In this paper, I discuss social bookmarking and the potential benefits of incorporating it into college courses. I also discuss the features that such a system would need to have, in light of the research that has been conducted on other social bookmarking systems, especially enterprise systems. I discuss how to motivate students to use the system. Finally, I suggest possible uses of a bookmarking system in the college classroom that I believe will lead to meaningful student research, collaboration, and learning. In this paper, I use the word “resource” to mean any electronic informational material, such as an image, Web site, journal article, or video.The Benefits of Using a Social Bookmarking Tool in College and University CoursesSocial bookmarking is a group-centric approach to organizing and storing bookmarks to resources. (Berkman, 2007). Instead of storing bookmarks in a private location such as an Internet browser on a personal desktop, bookmarks are stored in a publicly accessible location such as a Web-based application or an Enterprise system. Social bookmarking may be one of the most important tools for knowledge management developed recently (Berkman, 2007). The utility of social bookmarking derives not just from storing bookmarks in a public location, but also from another feature of these social systems called “tagging.” When someone bookmarks a resource such as a Web site in a social bookmarking application, the person has the opportunity to select one or more words to label the Web side. (Mathes, 2004). These words can be anything the person chooses. For example, if I bookmark a news story on CNN about the reintroduction ofbeavers in the United Kingdom, I might use some of the following words as tags: beavers, United Kingdom, Scotland, wildlife, conservation, endangered_species. Mathes asserts that people who tag are not classifying information, but rather categorizing resources, like a news article on the Web, according to categories that make sense to the person tagging the resource. Notice that the last tag is not a single word, but a phrase. Phrases are also permitted by social bookmarking applications, provided there is no empty space between the words in the phrase. People who want to use the tag “endangered species” may format the tag in several different ways: endangeredspecies, endangered_species, endangeredSpecies. Some scholars have developed best practices standards for tagging to encourage consistency in the formatting of tags.(Guy & Tonkin, 2006, January). 2Iantha M. HaightINF 385TSocial bookmarking tools and other applications that are created for the purpose of encouraging people to be involved in a collaborative activity constitute what Tim O’Reilly calls “the architecture of participation.” (2004, April 6). The more people who use these collaborative tools, the more valuable the tools become for their users. (Hammond, Hanny, Lund & Scott, 2005,