I’ve sung the praises of social bookmarking service Diigo in the past here at Lifeclever. It archives a full cache of every page in case the original goes down, lets you highlight and annotate Web pages, and it publishes your links to all the other social bookmarking sites automatically. What’s not to love? Well, I guess some people are perfectionists, because the team at Diigo has just a launched new and improved version 3 in beta. I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks and, for my purposes, it offers a few nifty improvements. Tags are listed alphabetically by default, and the Diigo plugin for Firefox offers a “Twitter This” option which sends your link to Twitter as a tinyurl link. The new Diigo also offers spiffy social networking/recommendation functionality, but that’s not my bag, although it may be yours. Either way, there’s really no reason anyone should use the Yahoo’s stagnant Del.icio.us service anymore. Diigo’s much prettier and it runs faster too! Go import your Del.icio.us bookmarks today.

I have found Diigo to be the best bookmarking tool on the web, hands-down

believe me, you have to give this new version a whirl, especially if you do any sort of collaborative work or if you blog or if you’re a researcher. For a great overview, see Social Bookmarking 2.0 — Diigo sets the standard for others to follow (bub.licio.us). That entry gives you the nuts-and-bolts of what Diigo does. An aspect I really appreciate (which isn’t stressed in the bub.licio.us article) is the control users have over whether or not to make a bookmark public, keep it private, or share it with others to a group. Another great feature is that users can make their annotations (the “sticky” notes) public, private, or shared to a group — and these settings are easy to change within a single bookmark, too. Diigo is quite simply fantastic! Congratulations to the whole team for bringing this to the web.

Diigo has been building quite a following in education. I keep running into them at conferences. They have a great product and are building a tool that seems to do more than Delicious, especially in education. Check it out.

Web bookmarking and research tool Diigo is announcing the launch of Diigo 3.0 today. We initially reviewed Diigo when they launched at DEMO 2007. Diigo is a bookmark tool but what I like about Diigo is their WebSlides feature. It basically makes a live PowerPoint-like annotated presentation using media from across the Web. Back in September I thought the tool was perfect for Web agencies, and I stand by this claim today. One of the new features of Diigo 3.0 is collaborative research. Team members can bring together links they find across the Web for comments and annotation. There is tagging and sticky notes that the team can participate in to make the presentation stronger. The other major update is the addition of more social components. If you install the Diigo toolbar, as you browse the Web, you can see what others think of the page including comments, who bookmarked the page and what other similar sites and pages they have bookmarked. It's all about discovery and Diigo has done a great job in this area.

It reminded me of the the review tools in Microsoft Word which I've used a few times with students - someone sends me a Word document and I add comments and suggested edits. The review tools can track changes I make as well as highlighting sections and adding notes in the margin. I can then send the annotated Word document back to the author and a conversation grows around the original document and our comments. When I first started using this feature of Word, I thought it would be great if you could do that with web pages. Imagine being able to get a class of students to collaborate on a web page: to highlighting sections, share their understanding, ask questions and add extra information. With diigo, that's exactly what you could do.Add to that online social bookmarking (which can be linked to other bookmarking services such as del.icio.us), the ability to highlight any text on a page and search for it on a range of search services using a pop-up menu, to blog about a page and link non-diigo users to your annotations on that page (this blog posted was created using the diigo Blog this tool) and a host of other features ...and you have a stunningly valuable educational tool.

I have also found Diigo to be quite an exciting tool and this year my year group is in a better position to use it. I structured it into an independent activity during a literacy hour with my Year 5 children. Using Diigo I annotated a set of written instructions with comprehension style questions and the children answered them in their jotters. The children were accessing the site using a class set of laptops. I wanted them to respond someway online but took a simpler step to begin with to test the concept. It worked very well and the children were well motivated and on task - they managed well with the new tool and took it in their stride.

I am experimenting this semester with using Diigo to show students in one course my annotations on Supreme Court desegregation opinions. I've been able to provide translations of legal terms (certiorari, de jure, de facto, etc.), tell students where they can skip (e.g., issues of standing, which are tangential to the topics at hand for the course), what passages to read in depth, and some questions to think about specific passages.

There are some obvious possibilities that appeal to me to provide access to reading but some possibility for revenues where appropriate, such as books that are free online but that carry a Creative Commons license requiring a "binding license" fee, so anyone can read a book but where publishers or copy shops need to pay to distribute bound copies. This idea adds to that imaginary repertoire.

Making the potion: Focusing on the research process

I wrote about reflective learning, and really identified with Will Richardson’s and David Warlick’s comments about focusing on the learning and community

Sharing bookmarks–another route other than wikis is to have students set up accounts on del.icio.us or Furl or Google Notebook, because these tools not only allow students to bookmark their findings, but to share their bookmarks with other students.  Diigo not only allows students to bookmark their sites, but annotate them, clip them, and share them on a blog, email, or album.   Bookmarking a collection of sites that they can use later conveys the idea that the learning is ongoing, that they can “add to” what they have found later, in a way that a set of notecards or a bibliography doesn’t, because they seem more “final” and product oriented.   And these sites allow them to network and learn collaboratively from one another.

Diigo: I LOVE Diigo. It's a browser add-on (Firefox and IE) that allows users to highlight text directly on a website, then add a sticky-note for comments, which can be published to a group. This would be an excellent way for students to share/discuss websites as they research. Highlighting text creates an archive on the Diigo site, essentially saving all the information (including a shot of the page) and comments in one place. From there students can add additional comments on all the pages, avoiding doing a WWW treasure hunt.

Diigo, which is Wikialong on steroids. A great cross-browser tool, Diigo is multi-functional, allowing users to highlight and annotate text on websites, post sticky-notes, bookmark, save video clips, post to blogs or the web and share. It loads into your browser and even offers a "light" version called "Diigolet" that's less feature rich but easier to use.

Like Wikialong, this would be a great tool for students to collect and share resources as they create wiki projects (or any other project!) Moreover, it supports multiple browsers, unlike Wikialong so if you don't use Firefox, you can still use Diigo.I think I'd use Wikialong for younger students (say, 4-9), then introduce older students to Diigo.