R/D3

1) What value (if any) do you think social bookmarking might hold for teachers and/or students? You may think about students sharing with each other, teachers sharing with their students, teachers sharing with other teachers, administrators sharing with teachers, sharing with parents, or any other scenario(s) you can imagine.

Social bookmarking is an easy way to share what multiple people have found on the web. I know that is an obvious answer, but it is as simple as that. As far as teacher to teacher, it is a good way to share websites for learning. It is a simple way to pool online resources together. For me as the only choral music teacher in my school district, I would want to connect with other choral teachers outside. I could see the use of it in the teacher to student relationship if research projects are a part of the curriculum. It would be a good organizing tool in which guidance could be given, or at least a place to start.
An additional benefit that I see in social bookmarking is that it is web based, not computer based. Not many students have laptops that they use at school and at home, therefore the research at one place cannot be bookmarked unless they do it via the web. I think that this is the big benefit in school work.
This is something that is new to me, and I don't believe that anyone in our school currently uses it.

2) Back to the Trends & Issues reading, to what degree do the definitions in this chapter correspond with what you have thought about this area and what it is you hope to do in your line of work (or in a future career)? Does is there anything surprising or very new you read in this chapter? Does something seem to be missing?

I think that these defenitions are pretty accurate, and the progress between the levels from where it starts out as a controlling factor, and has become a facilitating factor is important. In my line of teaching (vocal and orchestral music), practice, rehearsals, and live demonstrations and tactics are the essential parts of my teaching. I appreciated the line in the reading where it was stated that it is NOT sufficient to simply help learners acquire inert knowledge, instead, the goal should be to help learners apply the new skills and knowledge they have applied. If I download music into programs so that students can listen to, play or be tested in their musical accuracy, that will only have success if they can apply the techniques and principles learned in class. This isn't an example of social networking, but it is an example of how new designs in technology can help me in my music teaching.
In regards to how these defenitions apply to social networking, I look at the 1970 defenition as a start to it. In that description, the human element of bringing in communication and human learning gets the ball rolling away from the systematic style. It isn't until the 1994 defenition in which the the "system" is removed. When I was going through my schooling, research was very systematic, and it took a lot of time. We would have to go to the library, look up topics in a resource book, go to the card catalog to look up the book, find the book in the library, and then to take the time to find what we were looking for in the book. Throughout the whole process, I hoped not to miss any data, or forget where I read information in previous books. With social bookmarking, research is a piece of cake. It doesn't replace research, it simply pools all of the information together, along with the help of anyone else that has researched that topic on that network.