H20: Tagging for Academia

The Harvard Law School has launched a superb tool for sharing reading lists with students and other academics. Articles and links are given a weighting depending on how many other users have included the resource in their own reading lists or bibliographies. It's an instant way to assess the quality of academic papers online.

H20 is free to use and, as a student or academic, you can store as many reading lists or bibliographies online as you wish. As you alert your class or colleagues to your lists they can link to resources you have mentioned in their own lists, and hence the popularity of each resource is ranked.

In the classroom...
In a secondary school setting there are obvious uses for teachers who do not have the expertise to set up their own HTML website. With H20 no coding knowledge is required. Students can also create their own reading lists from which teachers can no doubt learn a thing or two, as well. H20 is better in many ways than del.icio.us for several reasons:

1. You can see all the resources of a category in ready-to-use, blibliography style.
2. You can organise specific resources in a reading list for a particular project or essay, whereas in del.icio.us differentiation is trickier to achieve. You would seem to need a new account to limit what appears in relation to one subject.

I may open my own H20 reading list for the research project I have been running on weblogs, podcasts and more besides. As always, time is of the essence. If I had seen this at the beginning of the project, though, I would have jumped at the opporutunity to categorise the huge number of resources that are currently printed out and sitting on three shelves in my study!