Social Bookmarking in Academic Settings

Two interesting academic social bookmarking sites are mentioned in "Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?" (EDUCAUSE , March/April 2006). They're Penntags at the University of Pennsylvania and H2O Playlists at Harvard.

At first glance, Penntags looks like a straightforward port of Del.icio.us' methodology, with some nifty extras. Users can bookmark and page web resources as with Del.icio.us, but they can also establish "projects" to collect links together, such as this one for Film and Psychoanalysis. But dig through the links and you find it goes further: many of these tagged resources are straight from the university's own library catalog. Very cool!

H20 Playlists is another social bookmarking site, but allows the incorporation of some structure into the way links are presented via "playlists", which are collections of related links subdivided by headers. "What is Remix Culture"provides a good example of how it can be used to present information in a meaningful way.

Penntags accounts are restricted to those at UPenn; H20 is open to anyone.