Group items tagged

Diigo is a social annotation and networking service. It is combining social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, Diigo offers a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform for knowledge users, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media. I just registered Diigo, I have time to know more features. It is free but need invitation for register.

I wrote a “Guide to Quality Weblogs” for students to use as a rubric to critique each others’ blogs. It addresed every trait I could think of that goes into a quality blog, from theme design to post design, from content on the levels of the whole blog to content of individual posts, from connectivism via links to conversationalism via invitational conclusions in posts, prompt responses to comments, and more. I assigned each student to critique three other students’ blogs using this rubric, and leave their critiques not in the comments - who wants a comment for all to see that says “Your theme is boring and so are your ideas”? - but as Diigo annotations that only members of our class Diigo group can see. Again, “Digital Natives” my patootie: many students left good comments that rightly belonged in the “comments” section as Diigo stickynotes, again showing they have no idea of the very basics of this world. But they did it. We’ll keep returning to these criteria over the coming seven months.

It seems as though every day I discover new search engines, bookmarking tools other Web applications that are intended to simplify the cluttered and overwhelming task of conducting Internet research. But let’s face it, most of these resources sound great in theory, but prove less effective in practice. Yet once in awhile I come across a tool that is inviting, intuitive and actually does what its mission statement says it will. Diigo is this type of tool. 

The catchy, quintessentially Web 2.0 name reads like a word from some obscure foreign language, but is actually an acronym for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff.” Though many enter the world of Diigo in a social networking frame of mind, the networking aspect is the core of the tool and only scratches the surface of Diigo’s capabilities. For teachers, a useful feature is the “watchlist,” which enables you to know what’s going on across the network through specific tags, for example “education” tags. The social annotation feature is the best way to collect and share online information from anywhere, and you can write about that information with the blogging feature! The first characteristic I look for in any tool designed to enhance productivity is usability; will using this save me time and effort? Diigo passes the “usefulness test” with flying colors. Plus, it has all of the information that’s important to you and allows you to share it with others educators. Perhaps this is what the author of the blog I’m Not Actually a Geek meant when he said, “It has changed the scope of what it means to be social.”

I learned of them when I read about their service in the MIT Technology Review several weeks ago.  It’s by invite only, but I wrote and told them that they had to give me an account because last September I was emailing tech-savvy friends to ask if anyone could design a service exactly like this.  I was willing to pay for this — like flickr or Mars Edit — but diigo is in fact free.  No one took up my offer back in September, but by cosmic coincidence some electronic engineering professor geek at Berkeley was dreaming about the same thing and designed it. What it does is this: you read something on the web, you bookmark it using diigo.com (you do need to install a little diigo bookmarklet on the toolbar).  You assign a tag to it (if you want), or several.  Then, you can literally underline the passages that intrigue you, and — this is the cool bit I’ve been waiting for — you can add a “sticky” note (just like on flickr) that associates with the part you’ve just underlined.  When you look at your bookmarks, the list will show you how many annotations you have in each article you’ve bookmarked, and you can then expand that list to show you both the underlined bits as well as your “notes.”

Further, if you are a blogger (which I am no longer, thanks), you can blog your annotated and commented-upon bits directly to your blog.  Or you can badger your friends with your brilliant insights to that last political science article you read by forwarding your diigo-bookmarked articles…  Whatever.

diigo looks to be what will finally make project collabration practical - meaning folks will actually use it and not just talk about it.