Social Bookmarking as a Component of E-Learning

An effective learning management system (LMS) is a vital component of an overall
E-Learning infrastructure in universities nowadays. In the simplest case, Learning
Management System can be seen as a structured repository of courseware materials provided
with additional communication facilities such as discussion forum, annotations, chats, etc. The
materials are structured as so-called E-Learning courses - repositories that serve one particular
training course. A significant part of such materials resides on remote Internet sites and
available as World Wide Web links - Universal Resource Locators.
Social Bookmarking services allow users to store links to web resources in a structured and
easily accessible way. The links can be created, modified, accessed and annotated by different
students. Thus, the link information can be seen as an important e-learning resource.
Collaborative creating a shared collection of links to resources and using such collection by
students can help to achieve better learning outcomes.
In this paper, we discuss a particular social bookmarking service as a component of LMS. The
bookmark repository is created for a certain e-learning course. We speak about two layers of
such bookmarking service: on the first layer students may define bookmarks, comment,
evaluate and classify the bookmarks as a hierarchy of folders. Documents referred by the
bookmarks are accessible by means of ordinary browsers and can be imported into special
browser plug-in like Firefox Pocket.
On the second layer, a special viewer application is used to access the bookmarked resources.
The application allows annotating remote resources, creating links between such remote
resources and even seamless reusing fragments of external web pages.
Social bookmarking has recently gained interest as a solid basis for implementing so-called
recommender systems. The social bookmarking system normally records some essential
personal data about using bookmarks by students and teachers - names of persons who created,
accessed, evaluated, commented and annotated the bookmark. That information can be further
combined with information of relationships between students that can be gained from student's
enrollment into different courses. The data can be easily processed to provide recommended
resources for a particular student.