Bookmarking and Me

Bookmarking and Me
My first step with this application will be to use it for my own personal professional development. This is in keeping with my professional style in that I have to try things for myself before I ask students to try it. I approach things in this way for several reasons.
First of all, I like to have some experienced with new technologies before I ask my students to work with them in case there should be any technical problems. If I have some experience beforehand, then I may have some experience with them and be able to troubleshoot.
Second, I truly do adhere the possibility that I do not ask my students to do anything I would not do first myself.
Third, I like to think through how I will utilize things in the classroom, real or virtual, thoroughly before implementation. I have seen what can happen when an instructor simply jumps on a new idea before they have really thought through how they could use it properly in the classroom.
The above conditions being laid out, I do have some ideas as to how I could use this approach in my upper level military history class. Here, it could certainly become a massive research archive, which present and future students could build and add to as they research, which could help with developing topics for their papers. Still, part of the assignment is to develop a plan for using social bookmarking as part of my own professional dev elopement.
As for my plan for social book marking as tool for professional development, I see myself using it to connect to various content sites on the web. This I will use both for research purposes and for teaching.
In the research realm, I tend to write a great deal on military topics. The social bookmarking will allow me to keep up with emerging stories such as the controversial remarks of General Stanley Mc Chrystal (a feed I have already highlighted on my Pageflakes page). I plan to use the pages to develop a major archive, and as I do so, to develop various sub-categories, such as World War II, Vietnam, and so forth.
It should be evident that I pan to use this tool to explore on my own first what I hope to then apply in my classes. Still, that fits with my approach to teaching as described above.
Jim Mc Intyre