How might social bookmarking sites be useful – for teachers? for students? for TLs? Are there any limitations and issues relating the use of such sites?

Social bookmarking sites can be useful for students, teachers and TLs. Keeping track of quality content is made easy, and some of the platforms are visually engaging, like Pearltrees, which is good for kids. They might need to do some research, and bookmarking is a good way to track potentially useful websites or content. If students annotate resources, teachers can track how students are researching from an information literacy perspective. The various elements of the social bookmarking process also build on twenty-first century skills.

Diigo is not as visually appealing as other platforms (Cool Tools for Schools, 2018-2019), so might be more suited to professional content sharing by the TL. On a personal note, I find Diigo a little difficult to navigate.

Although it can be useful to receive notifications when some new content is bookmarked, the constant arrival of new content can be overwhelming, especially during busy times when it’s hard to squeeze in some professional reading. If there is too much content at once, you can end up sifting through it to find the most important or interest pieces. Wasn’t that the whole point of social bookmarking? That the best bits on a topic are being curated for you? Then you end up sifting through it anyway.

Advertising is another issue. I wonder if it still pops up in a student account?

References

Cool Tools for Schools. (2018-2019). Thing 8: Digital curation tools. https://cooltoolsforschool.net/curation-tools/