"To Furl or not to Furl? That is the question!"

And what a loaded question it has been for me this past week! The term “to furl” is actually a sailing term that describes the action of rolling/folding up a sail using a system of pulleys and ropes to make life easier for a sailor, rather than doing it manually (on your hands and knees and stuffing it into a bag!) I guess the term is not far off in its comparison to social bookmarking as we ‘FURL’ our favorite sites in an easier manner using a system of tags/keywords instead of stuffing them into folders on one computer!! (As a sailor, I just had to throw that analogy in there!)

However, that being said, not unlike all the other tools we have been investigating in this course, social bookmarking was an even newer one for me. The safest and most reliable place to start my learning was with Will Richardson’s chapter on The Social Web in his book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other powerful web tools for the classroom. As I was reading his book, I was once again convinced that FURL must be the way to go with social bookmarking.

Setting up my Furl account was fairly easy! I loved Will’s screen prints in his book. (It helps out the visual learner in me!) It all seemed to make sense to me…I could have private sites or public sites, I can share with certain subscribers or to everyone, I categorize my sites by keywords (or tags), I can rate the sites and even write comments about it. Everything was going “tickatyboo” for me until I got frustrated by how long it took my computer to save a new site on Furl??? (I still can’t explain that one!) and by all the extra features that bookmarking a site with Furl involves.

So I began finding articles that reviewed or discussed Furl and found an informative piece written by Jim Wenzloff entitled, Furl, Furled, Furling. Here was another educator “sold” on Furl.net with a step-by-step guide to using Furl. He had a lot of great suggestions for using it in the school setting such as:

1. Web sites for student research or projects

2. Book recommendations

3. Professional research

4. List of books you would like to read

5. Placing web links on your school web page

6. Students can find resources at home and access them at school and vice versa

7. Share what you are reading on the web or view what your peers are reading on the web

8. Web site collections by school topic

I still wasn’t 100% convinced that Furl was the way to go without giving del.icio.us a try, the other recommended social bookmarking site. I was even more influenced after reading a few articles in Education World. Doug Johnson’s article entitled, It’s delightful; it’s del.icio.us! explained the bonus of being able to create more than one account so you could set up different accounts for different classes you teach, or different subject areas and using special tag codes created for your students.

I also liked the tag cloud features that deli.icio.us had to offer; another great visual for those of us who need a more graphic system of organizing. The del.icio.us page itself seemed easier for me to interpret, my computer saved the sites faster through del.icio.us (added bonus!) and my igoogle page is able to access my personal del.icio.us account whereas I couldn’t seem to get my bookmarks from FURL to log onto it. As you can see from my del.icio.us tag cloud on the sidebar of my blog, I eventually went with del.icio.us!

I still have some organizing and tagging of bookmarks to do since I imported all the FAVORITES from our toolbar. My biggest word in the cloud is bookmarks because that is the word that del.icio.us tags onto a site that hasn’t been properly tagged or edited yet.

I guess my investigation into social bookmarking seems a bit two-sided with only Furl and del.icio.us but I did read an article by Lorrie Jackson at Education World entitled Sites to see, Social Bookmarking that mentioned Scuttle and Buddymarks as other possible choices, especially for use in the schools as they are monitored for appropriate sites or can be administered through the schools’ own server.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is a great tool for myself personally managing recipe sites, vacation spots, my children’s favorite online game sites and other sites of personal interest as well as educational sites for great lessons and tips. I’m still a little overwhelmed with the work it will take me to tag all my existing sites but I know it will work out in the end. I’m excited at the idea of sharing socially and getting connected to sites discovered by fellow educators, librarians, even working moms with yummy 20 minute recipes!

As for the possibilities in my teaching or school, I mentioned a few above but here are a few I could really see myself using…

-Collecting sites for students in preparation of research projects (particularly for those at the younger grades)
-Sharing great sites amongst my fellow teachers
-Creating collections of resources for different subject areas
-Sharing with other teachers within study groups for professional development
-Creating a tag cloud of educational sites for my students on our class blog page
-Accessing my favorite sites that I found at home…at school!
-I’m sure more will “crop up” along the way!

To look at this phenomenon of social bookmarking more critically, I couldn’t help feeling a bit overwhelmed at the idea of creating another account and setting up yet another system of “organization”. Frankly, I thought I was doing really well with my Google Reader, my igoogle page, my list of Favorites and of course my blog of interesting links. Even after learning all the many benefits of social bookmarking, I was still leary of what Will Richardson refers to as “information overload” in his blog posting Tags vs. Trusted Sources.

Will I get bogged down with more websites and information than I really need? When do I start limiting it to just the places I know and trust?
Is it possible to get too much information and reach “total brain collapse” (Will’s words not mine!)?
Isn’t this just another search engine under the glorified name of “social networking” and Web 2.0?

I think Richardson says it best when he states “We are all going to find our own unique solutions. Bottom line is balancing the desire for relevant information about topics that you are interested in with the time you have to put into creating systems to bring that information to you.” I think in the end, the time invested in tagging and organizing sites WILL be worth the benefits I will reap in new information for my students and staying on top of my own personal “game”! I am very interested to see how consistent and faithful I will be to this new system of organization over the next few months and to further investigate all the potential that social bookmarking (specifically del.icio.us) has to offer!