Social bookmarking favourite Del.icio.us is finally getting strong competition from Diigo, as the edu-blogosphere turns its attention to the 'newer' kid on the block.
Never heard of Diigo?
Diigo is great for highlighting content on pages and for creating and sharing 'notes' on a given web page. For research, or collaborative information gathering and annotation, the highlight features are promising. The fact that you can search for notes recorded by others, and that you can share 'highlights' may take collaborative learning to a new level; but in reflecting on my 'hardcover' past, I've found that the one with the highlighter often brightens information that I'd rather skim past!
I suspect that librarians would be eager to share Diigo to students, if for no other reason than to teach the effective annotation of web resources. Educators looking to combat plagiarism might even call for students to share their web research by requiring the tagging, highlighting and annotating of sources with this tool. Advanced users will make use of the embedded 'webslide' tool, to include their research in automated slideshows.
It remains to be seen whether or not Diigo will make advances on the traction its gained of late, but this beta tool is so feature-rich that many educators are sure to become active 'diigers'. The fact that the site embeds a number of social networking tools (i.e., comment wall; friends' activities; groups...) will likely work against this tool's use within elementary and secondary schools, as filters work overtime to block such interactivity.
Will scholarly university students move to this space to avoid the distractions running amock in Facebook?
For links that you want to find and share easily, Delicious is the most accessible and efficient tool: bookmarking with tags takes only a moment, and the interface is uncomplicated. For higher-level thinking and public reflection about web content including the sharing of more complete meta-information - Diigo may well be the ticket!
The genesis of this topic is explained on today's Teacher 2.0 Podcast... 9 minutes of inspiration.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
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1 comments:
Hi Rodd,
Excellent post! Thanks for sharing your thought and Diigo experience.
Indeed there may be more filtering needs for younger students. Love to invite you to assist us scope out the requirements.
Thought you might be interested to know that Diigo was founded by a former EECS professor at UC Berkeley, so we’d like to see Diigo made into good use and contribute to the educational community!
Welcome to the Diigo community!
Best,
Maggie
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