Abstract

A primary challenge for any student, scholar or researcher is organizing and managing the massive amount of content readily available in today’s digital world. Several attempts have been made to provide solutions to this problem but many have fallen short of expectations. For example, many of the reference management software programs such as EndNote or RefWorks, as licensed products, are designed to support individual researchers in managing personal reference collections. On the other hand, the Web, and in particular Web 2.0, represents an approach to an evolving use of the Internet as a dynamic, participatory and collaborative medium for finding, organizing, managing, and sharing sources of information. This workshop introduces the use of user-defined tagging and social bookmarking within the context of an online freely available resource (CiteULike) for managing and sharing scholarly sources of information. These Web 2.0 technologies were introduced and implemented in an interdisciplinary NSF funded project focused on teaching students to effectively assess web site validity, engage in collaborative sharing and organization of scientific literature, and utilize technologies they were familiar with, social bookmarking and tagging, to research a scientific question and synthesize their findings. The benefits of sharing scholarly resources to facilitate collaborative work were demonstrated through this project.

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