You may have noticed (or you may not have) the daily bookmarks posting that has been showing up here for the past few days. It’s a list of all of the sites/posts that I have been saving to my diigo account, which in case you haven’t heard of it, is a social bookmarking tool that feels like a combination of del.icio.us and Furl plus a bit more.
With diigo, you can do most of what you can with del.icio.us in terms of saving links with various tags, connecting to other users who have saved the same post or used the same tag, and tracking either users or specific tags (or specific tags of specific users) via RSS. Even more, however, is that like Furl, diigo captures a copy of the page, so if it disappears from the Web at some point, you can access it in your archive.
But what’s really different is the diigo allows you to highlight certain sections of any Web page you’re on, and also gives you the ability to attach sticky notes to the site. Those highlights and notes are then visible should you visit that page again. But even better, if you have a diigo account and I have “forwarded” the page to you, you can see them add your own when you visit the site as well. Think digital feedback on student work.
Now while the diigo user base is much smaller than del.icio.us, quite a few people are adding some interesting links and resources. And one other nice feature is that when I add something to my diigo account, it also gets added to my del.icio.us account. By the way, C-Net has a review of diigo that highlights some of the good points.
There are a lot of applications for classrooms here, and I’ll try to expound on them the more I experiment with it. Bottom line is I’m starting to like this tool more and more, and I’m wondering who else might be playing with it.
(Image from diigo)
Technorati Tags: diigo, delicious, social_bookmarking
Hi Will,
I’ve been using Diigo for a while now. It’s a bit slower than del.icio.us but the interface is a lot nicer (both the Firefox toolbar, and the Diigolet bookmarklet). It’s good being able to see other people’s comments alongside your own, although I’ve not really taken advantage of the social networking side of it yet.
Cheers,
Mark
An extremely powerful tool!! I have begun to introduce this tool to my students. I love the potential it has for online research. Just yesterday, I utilized the blog it portion and found it to be very valuable. Currently, we are constructing a class wiki in preparation for the A.P. European Final. Students are to develop an analysis of online sites, and evaluate them. In the process, they are to examine the sites and utilize Diigo to interface with their choosen sites. All of them are connecting the sites to their individual delicious accounts, and then networking them amongst their fellow classmates. We are beginning to develop the social networking you were discussing.
I like Diigo, too, and I think social annotation is going to become an important tool for teaching reading. Have you seen HyLighter.com? It’s a similar tool designed specifically for classes by an education professor at Florida State.
There is another good review at Solution Watch
I chose Diigo as one of the first-day tools to introduce into my classroom.
I’ve been using it for about a year, and you nail all of its advantages over bigger-name competition.
Today I blogged about students using it for the first time for a wiki project in my 9th grade classroom.
I’ve also put some screencast tutorials on my blog–tagged “researching”.
Keep spreading the word!
Their support, by the way, is fantastic. Maggie always answers promptly and follows up. We need to support them back.