The Use of Social Bookmarking by Health Care Students to Create Communities of Practice

Abstract

Teaching and learning health and social care in a digital age produces many challenges for students and their teachers. A common hurdle for healthcare students and practitioners is the sheer amount of information that they have to make sense of. Another challenge is where this information is captured and stored, with people utilising personal, as well as institutionally owned devices. A potential solution to these problems is the use of social bookmarking applications such as “delicious”, where users can create a centralised repository of online resources, share them with other users, and view what others are bookmarking. This paper describes research conducted at the University of Greenwich involving 160 participants across three Schools and 5 modules, including Health and Social Care who were encouraged to integrate social bookmarking into their learning and teaching. Participants were instructed to tag their resources with an appropriate module code tag e.g. NURS1297 so that a repository of module specific bookmarks was created. Over a 4 month period, 160 users created 1430 bookmarks with 5032 tags. Further analysis of the bookmarking behaviour is discussed along with reflections on the suitability of social bookmarking to create digitally literate health care communities of practice.