Earlier this year, I was involved in helping write a course entitled “Web Fluency”. Now a prerequisite class for all of our students, this course was launched with the intent of helping our students understand how to leverage the Internet and not simply just use the Internet. Additionally, throughout the progression of the course, we had hoped to instill some basic media literacy skills that would assist our students with evaluating information sources on the Internet, identifying bias, and finding valuable portals for news and learning to supplement their classroom activities.
Not surprisingly, within days of adding this course to our catalog, I overhead a student in the hall demanding, “Why do we have to take this class? I know how to use the Internet!”
That is exactly how many of us feel today when faced with topics and discussions that seem to encompass ideas and technologies that we use everyday. The Internet is not exactly new. We’ve all been using You Tube for 5 years. Even Facebook and Twitter are second nature for many.
One could even carry the question further and ask why graduate students have to study Web 2.0 tools and blog for homework? Conventional wisdom would suggest we’re all teachers and we know how to use the internet.
I’ve felt like that from time to time in my professional and teaching career, but then I heard about Diigo. Now I’m starting to use Diigo. Diigo isn’t perfect, but it absolutely changes how you approach research and collaborative sharing in the world wide web.
Diigo is similar to Delicious. In its most basic form, Diigo catalogs and tags web pages that you visit. These tags and bookmarks can be made public, and you can share your Diigo bookmarks with others.
But, Diigo goes much further. Diigo allows users to leave sticky notes and highlight multiple colors of text on virtually any webpage on the Internet. Launched as an extension within your browser, Diigo helps you to not only remember where you were surfing, but why you found certain pages interesting. Friends, students, or colleagues who visit you pages and belong to your group can view you highlights, read your stickies, and comment. Additionally, with Diigo’s tagging features, by logging into Diigo you can review popular articles and tags in much the same way as Digg, Stumble Upon, and other social recommendation sites.
In short, this Web 2.0 application really brings book marking to a whole new level. Diigo is booking marking with commentary. Every day I’m leaving sticky notes in my newspaper, adding paper clips to magazine articles, and folding corners in my text books. Not to mention, as I read I’m also highlighting with a yellow pen and scribbling in the margins with a pencil.
Book marking is not new. Tabs are not new. However, Diigo’s feature set is unique enough that it really provides a whole new way to approach the web, leave information for others, and comment on the surfing and research of your peers, colleagues, and students.
With the example of Diigo and a thousand other Web 2.0 tools fresh in our minds, I sincerely hope that as educators and students alike we realize the power of the technologies at our disposal- there is too much opportunity at stake to take for granted.
Thanks for this very detailed description and discussion about Diigo. I have wondered what this application was about and how it differed from del.icio.us …now I know!
ReplyDeleteI like how you have defined the bookmarking activity and how you have presented the simplicity of its use. Sometimes, reading how a tool works is so tedious that I lose interest in "discovering" the tool. With your instructions in hand, I am now armed to explore the tool without the long interface of learning how it works.
I think it is pretty cool that you are placing sticky notes on your newspapers and paper clipping magazine articles in much the same way as we would the real, physical documents. That analogy alone, for me, is a selling point of this tool. Thanks for presenting it so well.
Scott - thanks for your great comments on my last video. I appreciate the feedback.