100 ways to use a VLE – #82 Collating links

I was once a Business Studies and Economics lecturer and I taught the subject for many years. I use to at that time use a range of learning technologies, which at the time was quite innovative, but today would be considered old hat or even backwards.

One thing though that I did use quite early on was the web and got my learners to use it to find useful news stories and share them in class. I would then collate those links and share them on our “learning platform” which at the time was simply a website I had created…

Now today there are a wealth of social bookmarking sites out there such as Delicious, Diigo which make this really easy. Students can save their website links, tag them and using a shared tag these can be easily seen by others on the course.

However these services are a somewhat dependent on learners creating accounts for these services and not all learners will want to and can you really force learner to create an account on a social bookmarking site just for the course? Unless they use it on a regular basis, they are probably unlikely to use it anyhow, or even remember to use it. That’s a reason why using a single account with a group of learners may not work either…

However if you are using the VLE, then all your learners will have an account for that and the VLE can be used as a place for learners to not only post their links, but also why they think the link is useful and how it helped them.

There is nothing to stop the practitioner taking the links and adding them to a social bookmarking service such as Delicious.

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