Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

I just finished teaching a computer ethics course at Judson University--okay, it's still Judson College now, but they will be changing to University this Fall (www.judsoncollege.edu). I used a web 2.0 tool called diigo (www.diigo.com). Diigo is an acronym for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff".It may be that you've heard of del.icio.us which is a very popular social bookmarking tool. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool plus annotation tool. It allows you to read an article, bookmark it, and within the article, make annotations like "highlighting" and "sticky note comments". This makes it an awesome research tool.In the past I have had students bring articles to class that pertain to the assigned chapters, but this time I made this an entirely digital activity. The students were to find online articles, book mark, annotate, and share them with the group forum that I set up for them. We then, with the group forum on the projector screen, would have each student talk us through their article.While this tool is still in "beta" the student assessment survey that was taken at the end of the last class seemed to indicate that this activity was well received.

In my experience, what makes diigo better? it saves the content of the page you bookmark, not only the link. Magnolia used to do that before they lost all their user’s data You can highlight! Important, as sometimes you don’t remember what was interesting in a page Posts are Private by default There’s a bunch of community features behind it. Example: pop psych you can post to other sites, including delicious (they are an example of openness)

On top of all this, there’s another feature that may well become revolutionary: adding sticky notes to pages, in a way that other people can see it. When using the Diigo toolbar, you can see what other people have highlighted, and also comments (sticky notes) they added. That means that you are no longer limited to leaving comments on blogs, you can do so in any type of page (even static pages). Diigo enables you to drop your comment exactly where it is relevant, not at the end of a long list.

All in all, I’ve never seen an entrance in a monopolized market (social bookmarking) with this strength and resolution. Diigo is very impressive, and my bookmarking tool of choice.