Wade Ren's Library tagged review →  View Popular

There aren’t many tech products I would consider myself dedicated to. I change browsers at least weekly, keep at least one Mac, one Windows machine and one Linux PC around at all times and a two-year cell phone commitment can seem like a prison sentence by month six.

I’m also not the kind of guy who gives glowing reviews, everything is usually tempered with a mix of good and bad, an attempt to find balance and deeper understanding.

But there is at least one service that I am truly grateful for, Diigo.

You see, when most people think of social bookmarking, they think of Delicious due to its popularity. However, for me and my specific needs, Diigo has been a savior, providing a much-needed service that’s simple, reliable and attractive.

If I’m going to rave about any service I use, Diigo would be it and as the U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving, I want to celebrate one of my favorite tech services and how much it has helped me.

I believe there is something very powerful  in this tool. I am in the process evaluating it for instructional and professional development purposes.




So far these are my thoughts:





1. I think I can easily mark up online student work with this tool.
2. I think online students can mark up each other’s online work with this tool. and discuss. One of the course activities is to use a rubric to evaluate an online course that the students will each be building as the main project for the course. The course review, I think, can be done using diigo. I think… not sure yet.
3. Online students can easily create annotated bibliographies of web resource in directed learning activities AND share and discuss them with others in the class.
4. This resource can grow and be available for the online course from term to term.
5. In addition, for webenhanced courses, this is an awesome, easy, slick, cool way to incorporate some very cool online enhancements to a f2f course that completely bypasses all the extra unnecessary flotsam you get with a full on CMS/LMS. you get a lot of functional features bang for the “buck” in this tool. It is a slick tool with a lot of functionality to suport interaction/collaboration, etc.
6. When i have my university administrator’s hat on i also see great potential as a tool to facilitate and enhance community and for professional development. I have an extended staff of 50-100 online instructional designers that i could use this tool with to aggregate links and info and resources and networking. We have over 3,000 online faculty that we could use this with to support them with info and resources and networking - differenciating between the needs of new online faculty and experienced online faculty… there is potential for discipline specific resources and info for online faculty… and it goes on.

3. Diigo (www.diigo.com). I’m just beginning to use this tool and don’t understand it thoroughly yet. It’s a social networking tool, but more so for my purposes it’s a way to highlight and annotate web pages and save them for future reference. You can simply read a web page and highlight interesting points, or you can also attach “sticky notes” to help you remember what you thought as you were reading it. You can make your work private or share it with the world - your choice.

I’ve been hearing buzz about other ways to use Diigo, like for bookmarking. For me, though, I see two primary uses. One is for my personal scholarship. My job requires me to read a great deal, and more and more of the material is online. To avoid printing reams of articles and then having the problem of where to store them, I can use Diigo as a storage and organization system for my personal library.

A second use is for evaluation. My job also requires me to evaluate student work that often takes the form of web pages. (I’ve become quite addicted to Word’s powerful annotation features for assignments submitted in that format.) With Diigo, I can comment upon their work directly on the page and then share the feedback with the student privately. So far, the best way to do this seems to be to set up a group of two, but there may be better ways. You can also have Diigo collect your annotations and send them to a “Friend.” Think about the stacks of paper this process saves.