Catshanghai

Recently, I have been thinking about the history of Internet bookmarking and its future possibilities. In particular, I have been anticipating a situation where bookmarking is used as a tool to check the reliability of websites, building on the process I summarised in yesterday’s post. Here is my overview of bookmarking.

Bookmarking 1.0 (1990s to 2004)
Bookmarking was adhoc. Early browsers allowed you to bookmark favourites, but this was useless if you moved between computers. Roaming profiles allowed your bookmarks to follow you around a LAN, but many of us tried and failed to maintain a list of links on a Word document.

Early weblogs were nothing more than a list of published links and Yahoo was first setup in the mid nineties as a directory of essential websites.

Bookmarking 2.0 (2004 to Present Day)
Delicious allows you to annotate, save and share your favourite websites on the Internet, either publicly or privately. This means you do not have to be tied down to a single computer to see all of your bookmarks. The inclusion of the Delicious Firefox and Internet Explorer extensions allow you to bookmark a page from anywhere on the Internet.

Many of us are still getting to grips with collecting bookmarks, but my ITGS students have been using Delicious to keep track of sources for their portfolio assignments.

There are other ways to organise the webpages you look at. For example, signed up users to Google services can look back at their search history to find out what they have been looking at in the past. Digg users can use this website to vote for their favourite Internet stories and Youtube users can rate everybody’s videos.

The Internet is changing so quickly that it is reasonable to speculate that the next generation of filtering and organisation tools are being refined or even invented as we speak. Let us imagine the near future by listing some of the features we would like from these new tools and call it Bookmarking 3.0.

Bookmarking 3.0
Some of our students are using Delicious to summarise and organise webpages, but it could do so much more to develop research skills.

Keeping it REAL
Alan November has developed an excellent framework called REAL for critically evaluating websites and pages by checking the web address, the contents, the author and the links. See yesterday’s post. It’s time that we brought this critical thinking to collecting information. Imagine a version of Delicious that prompted you to check the reliability of a website as part of the bookmarking process.

Keeping it Original
Let’s go further by anticipating a future version of Delicious that acted as an anti-plagiarism tool. It would work by taking your text and comparing it with the original source. If the two were identical or very similar, it would force you to attribute the reference as a quote or it would ask you to change your notes to become an original piece of writing. Turnit.com offers a checking facility, but it is currently aimed at teachers and examination boards looking to catch students out. It is too easy to copy and paste extracts from other people’s writing. A checking feature built into a bookmarking service would be a far more positive way to help students become better researchers by prompting them to make appropriate notes or references.

Would anyone like to have a go at building critical thinking into Internet bookmarking tools?