Social Bookmarking: Sharing Knowledge in the Web

By Helena Filippe   
According to Wasserman and Faust (1994) social networks are defined as a set of socially-relevant nodes, each representing a network member, tied to each other by several types of relations. Relations must always be defined in a relational context. A clinician’s life is all about building relations with others as in a network, with patients centered in our attention.

The learning process happens in a certain social context according to the constructivist paradigm of teaching and learning developed by Vigotsky.

The contemporary educator must bear in mind that he no longer detains the whole control over knowledge but more and more the role of a facilitator for the others around to build knowledge.
In this context it is not difficult to envision us doctors (educators and students) connected to each other thus defining the connectivism paradigm.

Social bookmarking consists in searching, storing, organizing, managing and sharing a data of bookmarks of web pages by tagging or labelling them in a collaboratively facion. A folksonomy or social tagging is then built.

In 2003 Delicious (www.Delicious.com) initiated tagging and the designation social bookmarking came up.

We lately decided to start social bookmarking in our residency group making use of this tool

to search, store, organize and share interesting ophthalmology websites that each one finds

We can very easily access anytime, anywhere the data selected, as a social network. Helpful and useful websites are continually being added thanks to the whole group contribution, in a collaborative way.

We save time, learn more, and strengthen our residency group both in intellectual and human sides.

There is an interesting video explaining how to sign up this Web 2.0 tool that can be accessed clicking here
You can find more information on Delicious clicking here