Learning New Things... Like Diigo

Whew-  thank goodness for snow days.  I think I successfully joined Zoom and Diigo, although currently I have very little idea how to use either one.  That will follow,  I hope.  So far I have added one article, on measurement.  You can see my limited library here.

I did watch the short video 3 times, and think I have a rough idea how the whole social bookmarking might work.  To use Diigo effectively, step one appears to be finding articles of interest and highlighting important content.  Step 2 would be to add a comment that will allow others to see what you are thinking about as you read, and step 3 would be to bookmark the article with tags, either those recommended by Diigo or your own so others can find the article.  It is only social bookmarking if you share it with others, so I guess a community is important as well..  Although I have never engaged in this using a tool like Diigo, I do share links with colleagues all the time.  We email them to each other. :)  I guess that is really rather old fashioned and time consuming.  I can see the huge benefit to sharing these links in a central location, and not limiting yourself to links, but to ideas by using tags.  Social bookmarking enables you to benefit from research and winnowing of research done by others and to share your own efforts within a community.  Rather than searching the whole web, social bookmarking provides a type of library where resources have been vetted to a certain extent and are organized by tags.  I think this sharing and sense of community is the hallmark of Web 2.0.  According to William Ferriter, writing on Digitally Speaking , Web 2.0 is characterized by "a spirit of intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence" that allows for easy and effective collaboration.  My school has just embraced collaborative learning communities this year, and although I know that teachers shudder to take on new things, forming a community on a site like Diigo might make our lives easier in the long run.

I loved the classroom-use idea in the Educational Leadership article to assign students rolls like "Captain Cannonball" to pose questions to get conversations about shared reading started, and "Middlemen" who look for common ground in diverse answers. Fabulous.