Anti-Social Bookmarking

Maybe it's the name. I just don't get this one. Alright, the handy thing is, with social bookmarking, I have access to everything I have bookmarked from any computer I want to use anywhere. And that could be handy. But I am a faithful laptop user, so I see that I get around this by carrying around my laptop and using the bookmarks I have saved to in my browser. With social bookmarking, though, I can share the bookmarks. Unfortunately, this is where I really start to bristle. I mean, I'm all for sharing if someone asks me for something. But I give my students access to my bookmarks so they can use them to find information or whatever and now they see all my bookmarks and they know too much about me. Maybe the term "social" bookmarking is putting me off. My school has a strict policy about not being social with students. Not facebooking or twittering or texting. I wonder what my administration would think about social bookmarking. I mean, what if someone had some freaky stuff bookmarked?!

OK, let's put my disbelief aside and find a way to use this in school. I could have a set a bookmarks for each topic that I teach. I could make these bookmarks available to my students for research or chemistry help or extensions or maybe even college search information. Students would then be working toward mastery of NETS-S standard 3 that states that students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate, and use information and locate, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media.

Just last week I was trolling for interesting science stuff on the Internet and I was commenting to a colleague from the southern part of my state that I had found some great stuff. She asked if I would share the websites and, of course, I agreed. If I had had my delicious account last week, I could have just directed her to my stuff there. Social bookmarking would be handy for that. I have read that diigo allows for classifying bookmarks as public or private. That site might be better for me.