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A powerful Social Annotation and Research Tool - DIIGO! Well indeed Diggo is the coolest tool I have ever come across on the web2.0 scenario. It is a social annotation tool, social book mark tool and a online notes. Fits good to the best researchers online, it is a team tool, that leverages the time spent online. You do not waste a single minute and not waste the time spent in finding data and loosing it. Find it, mark it, send it, store it, import it!! surprising, this is all accomplished by a single tool and it is so much under rated.

With Diggo you can be rest assured you have the data saved and sent in seconds! Once your fellow researcher (or a friend) gets online on the same page, knowing or by chance, he can see that you have left a message for him. All you need is, both of you will have to install the Firefox/Internet Explorer/Flock/Opera browser toolbars. These toolbars will make sure both of you do not note the same or miss an important data.

Not only researchers, or known friends, but also strangers with same interest can make use of (rather exploit) this tool and do wonders. Say for example a bird watching community is on the prowl for a rare bird, or the very famous Flamingos, they all land up in a page that has abundance of information about the Flamingos, they can mark certain text in the page and leave a comment. Say a professor is leaving a comment about the Flamingos, and their migratory pattern, the others can see this note, respond to it! Later people with the same tool (Diigo toolbar) come to the page can see the conversation that has happened on the web, and note that this page is quite popular.

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.

What it is:  Education Diigo offers k-12 and higher ed educators premium Diigo accounts!  The premium accounts provide the ability to create student accounts for whole classes, students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can easily share bookmarks, annotations, and group forums, privacy settings so that only classmates and teachers can communicate with students, and any advertisments on Education Diigo are education related.  If you aren’t familiar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking website where students can collaborate on the web.  Diigo works in to a project based learning environment nicely and allows for exploratory learning and collaboration.  

Education Diigo is an outstanding place for students to solve problems together.  Provide students with a problem and send them on a web scavenger hunt to find the answer, students can post their findings and notes about their findings on Diigo.  Students can collaborate online to solve the problem.  Education Diigo is also a great place for “teachers to highlight critical information within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves.”  This feature makes Education Diigo a great place to create webquest type lessons and virtual field trips around the web.    Diigo also allows teachers to collaborate and share resources among themselve. Education Diigo is a must for students who are learning to complete web-based research!

So why do I use Diigo?   I like its ability to enhance my bookmarking with highlights and sticky notes, that are retained with the page when I go back to it. I like that you can highlight and publish easily from Diigo to you blog or an email, and a reference appears automatically along with the posting. I like the ability to create lists on specific topics that can be shared. I like the ability to create groups to pool resources for specific subjects. I recently joined a few Diigo groups and have had some very useful sites brought to my attention. I like that you can access and search the bookmarks anywhere by full-text and tags. I like to search for the most popular bookmarks on a particular subject. I like the different ways to share and aggregate information that  Diigo offers. I have set it up so that a list of my new bookmarks appears on this blog on a weekly basis but this is just one option. You can now choose to automatically The tool bar is easy to download and makes it easy to use and aspect of Diigo whenever you are on line.

Of course you can keep things private if you choose to but that is really defeating the purpose of Diigo in the first place. Diigo also began offering, on Sept 19th, a Diigo Education Account Facility. I haven’t investigated this yet but a post about it was put onto the SLAV Bright Ideas blog. It is worth looking at. From Diigo ‘The Diigo Educator Accounts offer a suite of features that makes it incredibly easy for teachers to get their entire class of students or their peers started on collaborative research using Diigo’s powerful web annotation and social bookmarking technology.’ For an educator account, you do have to apply and fill out how/why you want to use Diigo in your school.

Although it pains me to say it, I think there is something better than Delicious out there. I first came across Diigo in the summer and have been playing with it on and off ever since.  Social bookmarking has been an absolute godsend to education and Delicious was at the forefront of that - but, in my view, it’s been surpassed. I had high hopes of the latest version when it was released at the end of July, but, to be honest, they just focused on the instructional design and look-and-feel rather than functionality.  You still can’t create groups or lists, or send messages to the people in your network, and you can’t annotate either.  All of which can be accomplished in Diigo and more

Diigo groups are ideal for team research If you have any need for team-based research, Diigo groups are ideal for you. A Diigo group can be public, private or semi-private. Pool and organize resources using group bookmarks When a member of a Diigo group comes across a web page, he can highlight, tag, and share it to the group. In this way, group bookmarks become a repository of collective research. Group members can also vote up bookmarks so important information stays on the top. Group sticky notes are great for discussion When adding sticky notes, you can make them private, public, or viewable only by members of a certain group. With group sticky notes, group members can interact and discuss important points right on the web page, preserving the original context. Group tag dictionary to enforce tagging consistency The group administrator can define a set of recommended tags for the group to help enforce tagging consistency. Diigo has recently launched an education version, where you can create class accounts and add privacy settings, so I recommend you have a look at this. Oh, and for those of you who can’t quite leave Delicious behind just yet, you can synch the two so that whatever you save in Diigo gets automatically put into your Delicious account as well.

The outstanding social bookmarking and annotating application, Diigo, has announced the release of Diigo Education.

Diigo Education has the following features: Teacher accounts must be approved Personalized Teacher Console A teacher can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation) Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums. To protect the privacy of students, student accounts have special settings which only allow their teachers and classmates to contact them and access their personal profile information. Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors. Educators, especially those in K-12 settings where Diigo is blocked by Internet filters, will benefit from this version. I strongly recommend you apply for a free Diigo Educator account and/or check out the FAQ and Getting Started tutorial.

now I use the Diigo browser tool because it is so much better at annotating, archiving and linking to other communities - in fact Diigo has transformed my research recently because of its amazing level of functionality. This is another facet of working with web 2.0 - if I find something supercedes and is superior to other tools I won’t hesitate to ditch those and migrate to the newer development.

Diigo is a particularly smart tool in that it enables me to drill down to information I want and annotate it online quickly and dynamically.

what school requires students to do -- think abstractly -- is in fact not something our brains are designed to be good at or to enjoy

it is critical that the task be just difficult enough to hold our interest but not so difficult that we give up in frustration. When this balance is struck, it is actually pleasurable to focus the mind for long periods of time

Students are ready to understand knowledge but not create it. For most, that is enough. Attempting a great leap forward is likely to fail.

an online research tool will be very helpful in organizing gathered information while at the same time making it available to others for collaborative purposes

Diigo, in my opinion, is not only an online research tool; it is a living knowledge sharing community.