Joel Liu's Bookmarks tagged Diigo →  View Popular

A few months back, after checking out the options available, I switched over to using Diigo.  It offers more options, and has some nice grouping features.  Also, I primarily use it because it can send links to delicious every time I make a new bookmark, and would import from delicious when I started, but delicious doesn’t offer the same options.  This way I have a backup of my bookmarks, as well as access to tools that interact with delicious.  This way, too, if I’ ever someplace that blocks one but not the other, I won’t find myself lost in the middle of a lake without a paddle.

Like most of the social networking tools, I more or less exclusively use it as a professional resource.  I do the personal posting thing in Twitter to some degree because everybody does, and it’s what makes the community a way of getting to know people, but I’m really there for interacting with other educators.  This blog primarily, but not always, deals with education.  Any nings I belong to are education-related, and of the major social networking sites, the only one I’m on is LinkedIn, a professional resource.  Diigo is the same for me.  It’s all about things tangentially related to education.

I may use Diigo to replace the Ning network that I am using in the course this semester.  I’ve used Ning mainly as a location for students to post profiles that provide me with a little background about them as individuals.  I’ve also used Ning as a forum to host class discussions.  I could accomplish the same goals by requiring students to create a Diigo account and join a Diigo group for the course.  I’d also gain the ability to share lists or resources with students.  I have a couple of ideas for Diigo assignments.





• Students read and/or view an assigned web-based resource and make annotations guided by a set of reading questions/activities.  After making their own annotations, they will look to see their classmates’ annotations before participating in a discussion related to the readings.  I wonder how being able to see classmates’ thoughts as they read the same material might impact understanding of each others’ points of view during a class discussion.


• Students create their own resource lists as they work on their projects.  For example, a student working on creating an educational podcast may gather links to the examples that inspired her, the tools she used, and the guides and “how-tos” that helped her through the process.  The student would then share the resource list with the other class members.


• Students could have a discussion on tagging and evaluate the group’s use of tags.

As I was using Diigo, I noticed that the annotation tools didn’t work consistently.  I experienced some problems.





• Diigo would only allow me to save private comments, even though I was trying to make public comments.


• None of my comments would save.

Somehow, I find myself trusting Diigo more than Facebook, although you
can connect to Facebook via Diigo. What's also present is the potential
for "Diigo-spam." Ok, I've spammed everyone in my addressbook. I can't
remember the last time I did it, but I hope that if you received an
email via Diigo from me, you'll jump in and give this a try. If you
don't want to, hit delete. Do I think Diigo is that powerful a tool?
Well, yes. It offers something Delicious doesn't--groups, and a base of
operations that interfaces with other tools. If I could share
information using Diigo, ohmygosh, one ring to rule them all.

One of the other aspects of Diigo I liked was that the Diigo crew is
hopping to improve things. Importing bookmarks from Delicious API wasn't
working well (i had to try 3-4 times), so they came up with an
alternative way to accomplish the import. Dean
Shareski complained about the interface, and they re-did the user
interface. There's also talk of creating an education (student) friendly
Diigo....

Annotations are a broadly useful mechanism that can support a number
of document and database management applications:



• provide a trace of use
  
• third party commentary
  
• information sharing
  
• information filtering
  
• semantic labeling of document content
  
• enhanced search
  




But it continues to be hard to publish to the web. If better tools
are provided to information consumers then readers will be able to add
commentary, make new connections, interpret content, and otherwise
promote an accretion of both structure and content on the web. This
process will add new semantics to the web and this new information
will be the source for new approaches to searching and filtering of
information.