We're launching a MOOC in October called "An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching." The first week focuses on four key principles of learning that play out in every STEM classroom. As a reflective and synthesis activity, we'd like to ask each MOOC participant to share a story from their own experiences as STEM learners, a story that illustrates one of the four learning principles. We'd like each participant to tag their story, first with the learning principle (prior knowledge, knowledge organizations, etc.), then with their discipline (chemistry, biology, etc.). And we'd like this collection of stories to be searchable by both tags. That way, if one wanted to see stories of how, say, prior knowledge plays in a chemistry class, that would be an easy search.

I was thinking we would have to build a tool to provide this kind of crowdsourcing functionality, but perhaps Diigo will do the trick. Diigo is designed to share bookmarks (links), but one can also contribute a "topic" to a group, which is what I'm doing now. And Diigo provides the tag searching ability I described above, along with the ability for users to comment on each other's post. There's also a "like" button, but it doesn't look like one can use that to sort search results. Diigo groups also have RSS feeds, so if we wanted to pipe data out of Diigo into some other tool, we would have some options.

The downside is that Diigo provides a lot of functionality we don't need, which could be confusing for MOOC participants who are new to Diigo. We'd have to provide very specific instructions.