Learning is del.icio Social bookmarking in undergraduate management courses

1. Learning is del.icio.us Social bookmarking in undergraduate management courses Pacey Foster, UMass Boston Jesse Kriss, JKLabs May 15, 2009 This work was supported by a Personal Teaching Improvement grant from the University of Massachusetts Information Technology Council Subcommittee on Academic Technology (SAT)

2. Overview • (Re)Introducing social bookmarking • Social bookmarking as a tool for student research collaboration • Design, implementation and data collection • Preliminary results • Conclusion and discussion

3. (Re)Introducing Social Bookmarking Definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking) • “Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy.” Implementation and applications • Multiple web applications allow you to store bookmarks • Bookmarks are available from any computer on the internet • Including metadata (tags) for bookmarked pages helps organize web content • Allows for social web browsing • - People are linked by tags • People with similar tags will likely have bookmarked other things of interest to you • Allows for the emergence of folksonomies and on-line communities • Potential to document the emergence of cognitive/social networks • http://delicious.com/mgtprofhttp://delicious.com/libraryofvinyl

4. Social Bookmarking in the Classroom Web 2.0 tools are becoming more common in businesses (wikis, corporate blogs, etc.) • Exposing students to these tools is important in its own right Students spend lots of time browsing the web and using social networking sites • Is it possible to capture some of this energy for classroom activities? • Social bookmarking sites are free, fun (?) and easy to use (?) • Social bookmarking could help students organize web content for research (or other group) projects • Student bookmarks will form a permanent resource for future sections

5. The Current Project Introduced del.icio.us to three undergraduate management sections • Mgt303 – Spring 2008 (optional) • Mgt303 – Spring 2009 (optional) • Mgt450 – Spring 2009 (required) Data collection on class activity • Ruby program parses delicious.com RSS feeds for “mgt303” and “mgt450” tags • Conversion to tab-delimited text file • Text files available at: • http://jklabs.net/tags/mgt303.txthttp://jklabs.net/tags/mgt450.txt • Informal user experience survey • Data analysis with UCINET and NETDRAW

6. Mechanics Deconstructed Research Application 2. RSS feeds for tags of interest (“mgt303”) 3. User data updated hourly and stored as plain text Jklabs.com - Ruby program- Parsing RSS feeds Delicious.com- Users- Bookmarks/tags 4. Data conversion and analysis using UCINET/Netdraw 1. Students register and begin tagging Data/Viz on Class - Tag clouds- User activity Your class

7. Mgt303: Managing Organizations

8. Mgt450: Organizational Negotiation and Conflict Resolution

9. Conclusions and future directions Demonstrated feasibility and potential future uses • Implementation and data collection in three sections • Some early adopters continued use after class • Many analytic tools and plug ins are available at http://mashable.com • Potential for student research teams/community building Identified challenges • Limited adoption despite multiple strategies • As an option - very few students adopted • As a requirement – a small number of students adopted • Size of the “required” section makes results hard to interpret • Generally, students found it harder to use than expected • Requires more regular integration with class content