Diigo – Web Highlighter and Sticky Notes, Social Bookmarking and Annotation, Social Information Network! via kwout

I wrote an article extolling the social bookmarking tool Diigo. In my zeal I left out some really important ways that Diigo can and is used so I thought it was worth a revisit.

Diigo’s tools in a nutshell:

• Research tools

• • tagging
  • list creation
  • persistent highlighting (if you highlight text on a web page it will show up there every time you return and if you make it public anyone else will see it, or only allow people in a group view it instead of the whole world) Try it out yourself by clicking the link no signup required. http://www.diigo.com/04tra
  • persistent commenting (same as the highlights )
  • archiving bookmarks

• Annotation tools
  • persistent highlighting (http://www.diigo.com/04tra)
  • persistant commenting

• Presentation tool
  • Webslides via lists (add bookmarks to a list as well as your own slides. It all plays back to whomever you send the link to with full web interactivity and they don’t even need a Diigo account, check this one out http://slides.diigo.com/list/tylerwall/web20_applications and you can even print it out)
• Social bookmarking tools
  • tagging
  • public and private access to individual bookmarks
  • search engine
  • unread bookmarking functions
  • create bookmark lists
  • share bookmarks to entire groups
  • see bookmarks that your groups post but you retain the right to not bookmark them.
  • discover people who have similar bookmarks, tags, groups
  • show the sites you bookmark most
  • messaging
  • cloud lists
  • Posting to blogs (I posted this article to my blog from Diigo)

There is more but I only have so much space.

So what can an educator use this application for?
Here are some ideas I came up with,

• Use the annotation tools to keep notes for yourself on important websites, I know sometimes its nice going to a website i haven’t seen in a long while and have a few notes or the important text highlighted.
• Make your annotations public and have your students become Diigo members which will allow your
• Create a list of links that are important to a course, this creates a webslide presentation that you can share with whomever you want. This will then bypass deep linking copyright (as far as I understand the copyright laws). The links in the presentation are still navigable and provide students an overview of resources.
• Broaden your knowledge horizon by joining a group. I have found dozens of E-Learning and Education groups which harness the power of the masses by bringing you all the best resources on the web regarding whatever topic you choose.
• Why not create a web research quiz? Set it up like a scavanger hunt by finding a bunch of websites that your students need to do research on and post questions on those sites using the “post it” annotation tool in Diigo. This displays your questions to them on the page that they needed to research which teaches them research skills and they won’t know the question until they do the research.
• Create a group for your whole class and make the research process a group activity spreading the knowledge around.

These are just some ideas that I came up with but the possibilities are there for the taking.

I want to hear about what you use Diigo for or ideas that you may have on how to use it for education.

StumbleUpon: Personalized Recommendations to Help You Discover the Best of the Web via kwout

StumbleUpon is a personalized discovery engine…say what? It is a tool that helps you discover web sites that you care about. It does this first by you telling it what you are interested in and second by you rating what it finds for you . The more you stumble and rate the more accurate it gets. It chooses websites based on what other people rate as good all according to your interests.  And of course like all good web 2.0 tools there are social aspects like sharing with other stumblers.

Although this could be considered more a distraction than something actually useful but you would have no idea of how many quality website resources from this service.

Check out the product demo here.

Introduce to Home | Diigo via kwout

Have you ever been at someone’s house, office, or even using a second computer and you want to bring up a website that you have bookmarked on your main machine and can’t remember the URL? Social bookmarking has set out to eliminate this problem and there are several tools to help you in a situation like this but 2 in particular stand out, Diigo and Del.icio.us.

The big dog on the block is Del.iciou.us which allows you to put all your bookmarks up on the web and accessible wherever you are in the world all you need is an internet connection. It has great functionality and is a great tool for collecting your bookmarks, it even has plugins for Firefox, IE, and Safari that allow for easy bookmarking and access to bookmarks.

My pick for best social bookmarking tool is the young upstart is Diigo (even though I use both). Diigo is a Research tool, a knowledge sharing community, a social annotation tool; you can highlight text (with comments) on a website, add sticky-notes to any page all visible to everyone (if you choose) who has Diigo installed in their browser. It can even create lists of bookmarks that can then be presented as a slideshow that can be accessible to anyone in the world if you so choose. These interactive browsing slideshows take you through a list of urls at predetermined intervals all the while still allowing the user to look through the webpage and be in control of the experience clicking links and using the webpage. Use it to bundle important websites together for students or co-workers. Try out the slideshow for yourself no download required (http://slides.diigo.com/list/tylerwall/web20_applications)  and here is an example of how to use it (http://wslides.blogspot.com/2007/09/emmbed.html)

Like Facebook you can check out how your friends are bookmarking, send messages to them, share bookmarks with them and create groups (like “web 2.0″ or “good recipes”) to facilitate the whole process.

Both Diigo and Del.icio.us are very well integrated into your browser and use a tagging organizational structure so you can easily find 1 bookmark within thousands very fast and very easily. So long story short Del.icio.us  focus is more on strictly the bookmarking functionality whereas Diigo has that functionality and adds to it many different social aspects and annotation tools. If you already have a  Del.icio.us account Diigo even makes the transition easier by allowing an easy import and bookmarking to both services through Diigo.

delicoious bookmarks