1 Tagging Electronic Resources for Modules – A Case Study in Web 2.0 People and Technology

is to investigate the extent to which social bookmarking can be used to promote collaborative learning. The motivation for doing this is to enable students to get more value from the informal collections of on-line resources that they may gather to support their learning. The study has two main strands: identifying the barriers to sharing resources; and exploring potential solutions. The latter has focussed on exploiting both the social and technology opportunities provided by “Web 2.0”. The human side of sharing resources has been explored through qualitative surveys with both Computing and Art and Design students to understand the sources of information that they find most useful in their studies, how they currently record and manage references to on-line resources, and their attitudes to sharing this information. These were then reassessed following a pilot study on the use of social book marking. The technology associated with sharing resources has been explored through the use of the del.icio.us social book marking service. A range of options for using the service were evaluated for their practicality, usability and manageability. The options included individual versus group accounts, and stand-alone access versus integration with the institution’s VLE. This led to the development of a shared tagging system within the VLE, linked to a shared delicious account, which was the