Social Bookmarking and the back-channeling experiment
My Advanced Technology in Schools class reviewed social bookmarking tools today. Each student chose a different site, signed up, and explored it in preparation for giving a presentation to the class today.
As part of the exploration and documentation process, each student posted a discussion topic in a social bookmarking forum on our Moodle course. They gave a run down of the major features and linked to the site. Then, as they gave their presentation, we all logged in and started a reply. We took notes, added questions, mentioned the things we liked, or the things we disliked as the presentation proceeded. It was rather like organized back-channeling.
The idea is that each student will be able to use our shared document from google docs, the original post, and the notes provided by every other member of the class to create a blog post reviewing this particular bookmarking service and its potential for professional or K-12 classroom use.
These reviews will be published in our community on eduspaces.net with a tag of “social bookmarking”.
At the end of the class, we voted on the social bookmarking service that we thought would best suit our needs and diigo.com won. Everyone signed up and by Monday we should have all “friended” each other and started sharing bookmarks!
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May 16th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Not sure I really see how it worked, but I really like the concept. Do you think a Moodle module could help in this task?
May 16th, 2008 at 9:28 am
The reason I liked using the discussion board for this is because everyone had their own thread. All the notes/back channel commenting were saved and readily accessible as replies to the original post. That way they could serve as notes for later review.
I don’t think a module would really add anything. I prefer the KISS principle when possible!
May 16th, 2008 at 10:34 am
Fair enough on the KISS principle. I follow it too, especially in those situations.
It’s just that I still have a hard time imagining how it worked. The reason I’m so thick is that I’ve only seen things like IM, chat, whiteboard, or Twitter used for back-channeling.
So, you all submitted forum posts, continuously? Using forums for semi-synchronous communication? Never thought of that. Interesting!
Now, you got me to try Diigo. It does look neat. But I usually get overenthused by a new tool until I find some dealbreaker.
Ah, well…
May 16th, 2008 at 10:50 am
We were submitted forum posts, but not really “continuously”. We all replied once, typing in our thoughts throughout the presentation (which was really very short–7-8 minutes) into the html editor and we all submitted once at the end. Then we went to the next discussion.
Personally, I liked the idea that there was more coherence there than you might find with twitter, and there was more permanence than you might find with IM.
I guess it is more like the presentations where people have the audience go ahead and add information to a wiki as they progress. But I was looking more to create a draft document that could be used as background info later.
May 17th, 2008 at 7:25 am
OIC! I think I get it, now. Sorry for being so thick.
It’s a nice strategy, which sounds well-adapted to your needs.
Haven’t done anything like this, yet, partly because there are few students in my classes who had online access. So I end up doing asynchronous blended learning.
I now teach online, but there’s no synchronous session planned.