Back to the Future: Using symbaloo.com to Aggregate Bookmarks

SUMMARY: A new way to collect and graphically display bookmarks is explored. Some educational uses are discussed.


How It All Started
In the early days of web browsing, bookmarking was a popular way to prove to decision-makers that there were Internet information sites of real education content and value. As teacher-librarians, we would apply old and new searching techniques and find the gold from the dross. I particularly remember a tense demonstration to school trustees and principals meant to raise funds for the integration of this "new-fangled Internet" in the school and school library. The convenience of bookmarks "magically" finding the Internet Public Library or the Perseus Project helped win the day.

The bookmark menu was like the iceberg: the speed of finding hid the time taken to search, analyze, and select. Significantly, a strong bookmark list could be (with patience) developed, imported, and exported collaboratively – by teachers, students, instructional leaders, support staff, and parents. Guided inquiry was thereby promoted through a focussed use of ICT.

This comfortable technology initiated a lot of people into the Internet. After all, it was really a bookish approach: find and promote the best resources, for the best purpose, for the best audience, and the best learning.

A Fan of Bookmarked Directories

I have always been keen on collecting the "best of" content for a school library or central library web portal. As past blogs have suggested, I believe that aggregation and pattern recognition lower information overload in personal and professional life.


So thanks to a number of Twitter friends, I have been playing with symboloo, a new bookmarking tool.

Briefly, you join the symbaloo community and use, copy, create, and recreate bookmarked galleries called "webmixes." Symbaloo's tools are robust enough to make an easy job of entering the url and title of each tiled graphic onto your palette. Copying another's sites is even easier. Webmixes from our own and others galleries are positioned as tabs on your individual menu.

Each tile may have an icon from three sources: the website itself, a short-but-sweet icon library, or your downloaded graphic. I started making screen shots of portals and home pages but changed to a simpler graphic where possible to quicken recognition. You can arrange the tiles using blank spaces and background colour to define subject-related areas. Spatial pattern recognition trumps that drop-down bookmark list every time.

The google search box comes into the centre by default but can be changed to your favourite site in symbaloo's settings. Upon clicking their icon, RSS feeds are automatically activated in the central box, a useful feature for the busy news addict.

Educational Uses of symbaloo.com
This is not an advertisement for this application. Decide for yourself whether the benefits warrant you participation. A user's guide is available here. The application is free for individuals but there is separate pricing for a school library or a school board.

After playing with symbaloo,  I can see some clear contributions of the application to schools and school libraries:

1. the whole community or a single expert can create attractive galleries for easy access to Internet sites:
2. preselection of useful sites can focus inquiry 
3. an individual's new research can quickly update menu for others to use
4. publishing personal galleries is an easy way to share the fruits of collaboration (an excellent, and authentic, performance task)
5. knowledge about the best and most appropriate sites for the task can be built over time
6. the galleries are a source of meaning conversation and decision-making at different stages of the inquiry process
7. webmixes can be centrally made available to a public or private audience (e.g., a board system, school). An instant school library webpage is thus made cheap and cheerful.
8. new and old webmixes can be mixed, published easily, and shared on social media
9. webmixes can be integrated into slide presentations to organize resource links used
10. documents in most formats (not just websites) can also be organized as a webmix for public viewing

I hope you like my first attempt. You can go to the public galleries an upload it to your symbaloo desktop if you like. I began with a Canadian example but will try my hand at other web mixes in the days ahead.