Adventures in Social Bookmarking

Digging into Diigo

This week's big task was to explore social bookmarking using the Web 2.0 tool Diigo. I have to admit, at first glance I wasn't at all enchanted with Diigo. Perhaps it would be more apt for me to label this post Disenchanted with Diigo. Last week when I was exploring Protopages, I was hooked! I couldn't stop playing with the technology. I wanted to know more! I had to figure out how I could make different things work. This week, my reaction to Diigo was simply....meh.

I think in terms of technology, we're always going to come across something that we LOVE and can't do without and then other things that we'd gladly pick up and toss out the window never to see the light of day again. Goodbye Diigo! Goodbye!!! Well, in spite of the dramatics, after coming back to it later in the week I found it truly wasn't that bad.

Social Bookmarking is defined as:

Social bookmarking is a user-defined taxonomy system for bookmark s. Such a taxonomy is sometimes called a folksonomy and the bookmarks are referred to as tags. Unlike storing bookmarks in a folder on your computer, tagged pages are stored on the Web and can be accessed from any computer. Technorati, a blogging site, describes the system as "The real-time Web, organized by you." Web sites dedicated to social bookmarking, such as Flickr and del.icio.us, provide users with a place to store, categorize, annotate and share favorite Web pages and files. (http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/social-bookmarking)

On the outside this seems like a great idea. I've been bookmarking sites for years. As anyone who has gone through multiple computers knows, migrating your bookmarks can sometimes be a hassle. The ability to store and share your bookmarks on a website or in the cloud would eliminate the problem of bookmarked sites disappearing when your old computer dies a sudden death. Of course, if your multitudes of bookmarks lead to websites that are no longer in existence you may be out of luck. There's always one of my favorite tools, the Internet Archive aka Wayback Machine available to try and save the day. Even that tool has it's limitations, but it can help you track down some favorite sites that have bit the dust since you last visited.

Considering the above definition, I have used social bookmarking in the past with Flickr. Although it isn't mentioned in the above, I would think that a website like Pinterest could also be considered a social bookmarking tool. I digress, let's get back to the disenchanting, but not so bad technology known as Diigo.

Signing up & Installing Diigo

My first experience with Diigo this week was in the Safari browser on an iMac. The sign-up process was fairly simple. I was able to easily sign up using my Google credentials. I was also able to request an educator account with no problems. When I went to actually install Diigo the instructions to drag the app into the bookmark area did not seem to work for Safari. I simply switched over to Chrome and had it working fairly quickly. I also decided to download the app on my phone.

The Diigo App

The Diigo app for iPhone I would primarily find useful for it's ability to save a page and allow you to highlight on that saved page. iPhone's Safari App already allows you to bookmark pages, so I really didn't care much one way or the other for an additional way to bookmark. I've included a few screenshots of the bookmarking and highlighting process on iPhone below:

I found this website for EdTech Magazine. To save it with Diigo, I first clicked on the share icon at the bottom center.

Swiping right all the way to the end of my options, I found Diigo.

The Add Bookmark dialog allows you to add the page an outline, share with a group, add tags, and add a description in addition to simply bookmarking the page. You can also mark it as private. 

If you open the Diigo app on your phone, you'll see a list of all your saved bookmarks. You can tap on the name to open the bookmarked page. 

With the bookmarked page open in the app, you'll be able to add highlights.

Diigo in Education

I think overall the grouping ability of Diigo has the most use in an educational context. With a Diigo group, the teacher can share bookmarks with the students in the class and they can in turn post links. 

A screenshot of the ETEC 527 class Diigo page. My classmates have been diligently posting links!

The Diigo Teacher Console. It's fairly easy to add a class and add/invite students.  You'll see my console above is from before I added any groups.

After clicking on Create a group for my class, the above dialog pops up. 

If you are not so creative in choosing your group name, you'll have to try again...

The newly created group page. 

Once you've created a group, you can use one of three ways to invite students to join. I think the most useful option for the classroom may be the first, where the teacher can create student accounts without students needing to share personal info like email addresses. 

It's pretty simple to just add student names in the list and click create. To further preserve student privacy, I would likely use assigned pseudonyms.

I think this tool might be useful in grades 6/7-12. I likely wouldn't use it with younger students as the interface isn't overly appealing to children.