Maggie Tsai's Bookmarks tagged Diigo →  View Popular

As the genealogy community on Facebook develops, we are seeing many ways this platform can support us beyond the obvious socializing and networking features. One Facebook tool we can all use is the Diigo application. If you’re not familiar with Diigo, it’s an online bookmarking system that allows you to bookmark your favorite sites and pages with tags for quick retrieval, highlights to focus on the content you find useful, notes to add to the content and the ability to share with others. I’m just touching the surface of Diigo’s usefulness - as you’ll see in the further reading section below.

The Diigo application on Facebook only displays bookmarks - yours and your Diigo friends. You will see the bookmark information including any notes or highlighted text associated with the bookmark by clicking the Expand link. Following any of the bookmark’s links will take you out of Facebook. If you click on one of a bookmark’s tags, it will take you to your bookmarks tagged with that tag at the Diigo site.

For well over a decade, my bookmarks have been machine specific and usually destroyed and lost when I've changed machines. Sure, people have options to save, import, and export bookmarks but I've never wasted my time. My philosophy has been, "If I can't find it again then it wasn't that important."

Silly, I know.

Today, though, there is something compelling about the service Diigo that might change my Internet surfing behavior. Two years ago, Diigo was marketed as a research tool. This year, Diigo is marketed as a social bookmarking tool.

I'm not really into social websites - except FriendFeed. The idea that everything must be shared is total nonsense. I do not share all of my bathroom visits and cannot bring myself to believe sharing my Internet surfing habits are any more valuable than the waste products being flushed down the pipes. Still - I was curious enough about Diigo to activate the account and try out highlighting, commenting, and writing this blog post.

First, I added the Diigo toolbar to firefox. Click, done. Setting up the "Send to Blog" was just as easy. I simply added the URL, name, and password. Diigo did the rest.

I Dig (not Digg) Diigo (not Digg-o)

That would be Diigo. Spelling D-i-i-g-o. Two eyes? Two 'i's"? Whatever. Spell it right and then go get it.

Diigo is one of the few Web 2.0 tools that I find both useful and utterly cool. It actually has value and purpose, because it best represents social bookmarking - which has value and purpose. Lots of it to someone who lives on research -feasts on knowledge and spits out judgments which may be questionable at times (many times) but at least are raising information-soaked questions, not judgments devoid of content.

Classroom idea: set up a “tag” dictionary - it’s one of the options available when you create Diigo groups. Makes for easy evaluation: search a tag and then you’ll see which students have annotated the site.

Concept of tagging vs. concept of list - You can switch list into slideshow presentation of the websites you have chosen from Diigo. The pages are “live,” not just images.

Use the By Tags search option to find users who are adding specific tags to their bookmarks - like Huguenot or Bavaria or Civil War.  Search People gives you many ways to find like minds who may be able to help your research efforts.

Networking.  Without visiting a gas station.  Life is good.

How can you use it effectively in instruction?

As my intermediate students complete the research project we assign, this will be a terrific way for them to match note-taking skills with technology skills. However, it will be vital that we first discuss “copying” versus “note-taking” so that they don’t learn to rely on highlighting as their primary method of taking notes for their paper.

What are other education applications for this tool?

We complete a research report with note-taking project in class so that students are prepared for the research report required in their STEM (Science) Fair project. Every one of our students has to complete this assignment, so they will be able to apply the on-line note-taking skills at home.