This presentation raise questions about which ‘new’ literacies are relevant in school to prepare students for reality in information society and how this is combined within the subject and organisation of collaborative learning activities.

1. Social bookmarking in education

2. Future?
The technolgical inventions can lead to a
radical shift in the educational systems
and learning activites, but if we wants
that to happen it require innovations not
only invensions (Jacobson &
Reimann, 2010)
CC BY-NC 2.0 by Trondheim Byarkiv
Sutherland, R. (2009). Improving classroom learning with ICT. Milton Park Abingdon Oxon ;;New York NY: Routledge.
Jacobson, M. J., & Reimann, P. (2010). Invention and Innovation in Designing Future Learning Environments. Designs for Learning Environments of the Future (pp. 205-232). Springer US. Retrieved from
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-88279-6_8

3. Teaching material?
"Finding and organizing online content related to
personal interests and learning objectives can be a
difficult task, given the quantity of information on
the web and the ease of adding more.”

4. • Web 2.0 in education emphasize the co-
construction of knowledge, and the use of
knowledgeable external sources.
• But just how is the students‟ knowledge
collaboratively constructed on the Web?

5. Diigo
• Sharing bookmarks in Diigo involves
– making up tags
– share Web bookmarks with one another,
– share description,
– highlighted text, and
– discussion around the bookmarked page.

6. Discussion on the topic of
Darwin and evolution.

7. Discussion on the topic
- in Diigo

8. Learning in a social bookmarking
site
Many opportunities for learning in a social
bookmarking site,
- selection and reading of external
material, discussing, commenting, and highlighting.
- tagging items can assist students in individually and
collaboratively structuring information

9. Categorization of concepts
- in science education
• Classification is of fundamental importance in
natural science
• To work with the relationship between everyday
and scientific concepts is fundamental in
educational activities.
• Learning scientific concepts belongs to
specialised literacy, a subject specific discourse.

10. Social bookmarking in practice
- the teacher‟s view
• The idea of using Diigo was from the teacher's
point of view that students and the teacher could :
– build a common 'content collection‟
– jointly discuss the content of the information
– build a 'conceptual cloud' / tag cloud – folksonomy
– work individually in collaborative tools

11. Social bookmarking in practice
- the teacher‟s view
• Students formulate their own questions about
evolution and typed the question in Diigo
• Searched for information that were relevant
• Save the information in the common group
• Tag with the most important concepts/words in
the text and "highlight" the central parts of the
content and write comments about the
'highlighted' content.

12. Teachers‟ experiences
Att i Diigo gemensamt möta information har i
praktiken visat sig fungera*
– Eleverna ser andras understrykningar och kan göra
egna, samt att sätta ”post-it” lappar på sidorna och där
kommentera innehållet.
– Genom detta uppstod samtal om innehållet, samtal
som fångades upp och utvecklades under lektionstid
– Dialogerna har inte varit begränsade av tid och rum
utan fortsatte mellan undervisningstillfällena
* Lärarens reflektioner efter att ha genomfört undervisningen
Se: http://kollaboration.se/blog/?tag=diigo

13. Teachers‟ experiences
“En av de största fördelarna med verktyget var att
vi snabbare kom till en annan nivå, där vi utifrån
det vi förstår av informationen kan diskutera
viktiga frågor i t.ex. genteknik istället för att ”bara
lära oss fakta”.”*
* Lärarens reflektioner efter att ha genomfört undervisningen
Se: http://kollaboration.se/blog/?tag=diigo

14. Teachers‟ experiences
Andra fördelar med att använda Diigo
– information som eleverna möter är mer aktuell och
– att vi arbetade med ett vidgat textbegreppet, att
– eleverna tvingades även läsa igenom informationen
på ett annat sätt när de skulle tagga, markera viktiga
delar
* Lärarens reflektioner efter att ha genomfört undervisningen
Se: http://kollaboration.se/blog/?tag=diigo

15. Analyse of students tagging

16. Analyse of students tagging
As one would expect when trying novel technology
in class, results were mixed
The students
– collaboratively created a resource of multimodal texts
and in this work the categorised the texts
– were exposed to all kinds of texts, highlighted
important parts
– discussed the bookmarked items in Diigo

17. Analyse of students tagging
Students tagged in very different manners and
several students did not tag at all
Problems with tagging
– many unscientific
terms occurred
– misspellings and
use of synonyms

18. Discussion
• Keyword tagging is a difficult task, when using
social media in education more effort has to be
spent on skills such as tagging
• Tool provides affordances for co-constructing
knowledge in the class, but to understand/learn
the scientific concepts and learn how to tag
information in a tool that requires specialized
kinds of digital literacy

19. Demanding balance for the teachers (and
the students) between teaching subject
specific knowledge and introduce new
cognitive artifacts, where is the need for
at the same time teaching digital-literacy

20. Discussion
Digital literacies can not be separated from other
literacies such as categorisation, and these skills
can not be separated from subject specific
knowledge and the social and collaborative
functions of tools (Knutsson et al, 2012)

21. Discussion
To appropriate scientific knowledge just classifying
and tagging text is not enough,
– one suggestion based on the case here is to combine
the tagging possibilities in a tool such as Diigo with
concept mapping (tools)
– further pedagogical step would be to analyse and
rearrange the students tags and the tag cloud

22. This presentation raised
questions about which
„new‟ literacies are
relevant in school to
prepare students for reality
in information society and
how this is combined
within the subject and
organisation of
collaborative learning
activities.

23. References and further reading
Buckingham, D. (2006). Defining Digital Literacy: What do young people know about digital media? Digital Kompetanse: Nordic
Journal of Digital Literacy, 1(4), 263-276.
Karlström, P., Cerratto-Pargman, T., & Knutsson, O. (2008). Literate tools or tools for literacy? - A critical approach to language tools in
second language learning. Digital Kompetanse - Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 3(2), 97-112.
Knutsson, O., Blåsjö, M., Hållsten, S. & Karlström, P. (2012) Identifying different registers of digital literacy in virtual learning
environments, Internet and Higher Education (2012), doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2011.11.002. Article in press.
Jacobson, M. J., & Reimann, P. (2010). Invention and Innovation in Designing Future Learning Environments. Designs for Learning
Environments of the Future (pp. 205-232). Springer US. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-88279-6_8
Ludvigsen, S. R. (2011): What counts as knowledge: learning to use categories in computer environments, Learning, Media and
Technology, DOI:10.1080/17439884.2011.573149
Ludvigsen, Sten & Mørch, Anders Irving (2003). Categorisation in Knowledge-Building: Task-specific Argumentation in a Co-located
CSCL Environment, In Barbara Wasson; Sten Ludvigsen & Ulrich Hoppe (ed.), Proceedings of the International Conference on
Computer Support for Collaborative Learning 2003 (CSCL 2003). Kluwer Academic Publishers. ISBN 1-4020-1383-3. s 67 – 76
The Horizon Report: 2009 K-12 Edition (2009) The New Media Consortium and the Consortium for School Networking
http://eskillslearning.net/uploads/2009-Horizon-Report-K12%20with%20summary.pdf

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Image & licensing info in the notes section of slides
Presentation licensed: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
The presentation can be downloaded from:
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Contact niklas.karlsson@kollaboration.se or @niklas_karlsson
Doktorand vid Institutionen för biologi och miljövetenskap.
http://lincs.gu.se/members/niklas-karlsson/