Group items tagged

But Diigo had a few other features that I also enjoyed. First of all it allows me to expert and import sites with my del.icio.us account which was convenient. It also allows me to make a blog post of my finds right away. I can add tags just like with deli.cio.us and that helps me to keep organized. I can also search the finds of others using Diigo. Diigo was originally designed to be helpful to researchers so I find it to be very user friendly. But the part I REALLY enjoy, is the opportunity to HIGHLIGHT the parts of article I am reading that I find to be interesting or important. If you ever saw a book after I am done with it, you'd see highlighting all over it! I am so happy to be able to extend this habit to my web surfing! I can also add "sticky notes" with my comments on them which is akin to writing in the margins. I love doing that too!

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: I think I can easily mark up online student work with this tool. 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. Online students can easily create annotated bibliographies of web resource in directed learning activities AND share and discuss them with others in the class. This resource can grow and be available for the online course from term to term. 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. 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.

We had a blast meeting with David LaPlante, chairman of the State of Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology and CEO of Twelve Horses and his crew, Mike Henderson, Earl Spriggs & Leilani Schweitzer. Twelve Horses is a full-service relationship marketing and messaging company specializing in designing interactive communication solutions. It’s great knowing that many workgroups and companies are discovering and finding Diigo to be quite useful for both personal productivity and effective collaborative research… reasons that inspire us to create Diigo in the very first place. Besides “What / Why Diigo”, we also chatted about “Why Reno / Tahoe” To find out the inside scope, be sure to check out our interview and podcast

However, Diigo is much more important than that to be relegated to a mere service that directs users to the outlandish, latest web page hype. There is a promise of research and community knowledge gathering that doesn't have much use for a Thumb up rating systems. They want to collaborate more intimately than that.

Diigo is by far the most fully featured social bookmarking site in this list, and offers several unique capabilities. The most notable feature is that users can highlight text right on the page, as well as make annotations via a “sticky note” for later viewing.There are also other very useful features. I particularly liked the sophisticated and advanced search option for doing a keyword search of one’s own or public bookmarks. On that page you can limit a search by a phrase, and restrict a search to a URL, title, comments or highlights. You can even search “on” specific users as wellNote that when you place a “sticky note” to comment on a page for your later viewing, that note is viewable by anyone else in the Diigo community that views that page too! .There are some other interesting and unique features on Diigo. For instance, when highlighting a word on any page with Diigo’s bookmarking tool, a drop down menu automatically appears that allows users to search for that highlighted word on various search engines, social bookmarking sites; blogs, on the active site and more. I also had much more control in formatting when saving a page; and had an option to forward the page to another person as well.What about the all important group feature? Well, Diigo rounds out its offerings very nicely by just this month launching its “Groups” function. That feature looks to be a clear and elegant way to allow anyone to set up a private environment for sharing your bookmarks. Ultimately, if you combine the Web annotation capabilities with the ability to share in groups, Diigo has created a very enterprise friendly social bookmarking service. And, according to a spokesperson at the firm, this Groups function is “just the first of many more advanced group collaboration functions that we will be introducing in several phases” So we look forward to staying tuned!My Grades:Group Function Capability: AResearch Value: A-Design/Interface/Ease of Use: A-Fully Featured: A-(only missing “related users” and “larger topics”)