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Personal Learning Networks are all the rage at the moment. As with a lot of “modern” things, they’re existed for a long time but have now got a snappy new name. It used to be called “advice from friends and colleagues”. But in the era of social media the word friend has taken on a new meaning. Social media has provided me with a lot of friends who I’ve never met and never spoken to. I’ve exchanged a few tweets with them, commented on or received comments on a blog article, or maybe read a few forum posts, and as a result these people are, in Web 2.0-speak, friends. A PLN can take advantage of lots of different services – Facebook is perhaps the best-known, Ning is also very popular and offers The Educator’s PLN, but there are lots of others, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Of all the available services, the one I find the most fascinating (and the most useful) is Twitter. One of the most interesting things I learned about Twitter before I even tried it was that it is like Marmite. It polarises.

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.

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It would be easy to dismiss Diigo as yet-another social bookmarking tool, but that would be a big mistake. Diigo’s highlighting, bookmarking and site sharing tools are a subset of features in a rich collaborative application that puts information discovery and the writable Web at the center of discussions among colleagues, friends and like-minded people. Diigo represents a move to maturity in the Web 2.0; it is a business tool, leveraging social models to deliver real value to its users.

September 28, 2009

by David Pierce

Sense-making with PKM

People learn socially

Effective learning is the difference between surfing the waves or being drowned

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Internet Privacy The things we do and say online leave behind ever-growing trails of personal information. With every click, we entrust our conversations, emails, photos, location information, and much more to companies like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. But companies - and the government - are collecting that information in ways that fundamentally threaten our freedoms.