Social Bookmarking: It’s not just for breakfast anymore

There is an awesome list of the Top 100 ToolsFor Learning 2011 that showcase some of the GREAT tools that are out there. I decided to revisit and update an article I wrote last year on Diigo and give some additional background to social bookmarking.

So...this Top 100 list is a pretty neat list of tools. I went through the list and counted 74 of the tools I have actually tried out (although on a regular basis, probably less than half of that are things I use). Some sections I had never even heard of! Noticeboard and Online Stickies, Social Media Dashboards, & Curation Tools…so some exploring to do later. (I have no idea what a curation tool is, and apparently Word doesn’t either, as it comes up misspelled. One that jumped out is my old friend, Diigo.

Diigo. I have used Diigo now in my professional and personal life for two years now and had no idea what “Diigo” meant until I decided to write this post (and this is my second blog post on Diigo). Pronounced “DEE-GO” and is an abbreviation for Digest of Internet Information, Groups, and Other stuff. (That is from the Diigo site and not really sure why it isn’t Diigos…the “s” for “Stuff”) Diigo is under the list, Social Bookmarking.

Social Bookmarking? Social bookmarking refers to the ability to save bookmarks online, but also organize, manage and SHARE those bookmarks. It goes back to 1996 with the launch of an online service called itList. For 1996, it was pretty advanced. It allowed users to create public and private lists. From there a bunch of companies came and went, but in 2003 social bookmarking went mainstream with the launch of Delicious, known as del.icio.us. del.icio.us (notice the clever use of the suffix .”us”) allowed for “tagging” with bookmarks. Tagging is just a form of labeling that helps organize bookmarks and also search for them. Yahoo! purchased del.icio.us in 2005 and it became the social bookmarking standard. In 2010, Yahoo! announced that it would be discontinuing the service and floods of people left to the up-and-coming service, Diigo. Diigo had been around since 2006, but with the announcement of Delicious shutting down, people flocked  to Diigo. Probably helped that Diigo soon implemented a tool for Delicious users to import their bookmarks directly in to Diigo accounts. Delicious wasn’t discontinued, however, and it is number #24 on the Best Tools list. Want a GREAT introduction to Social Bookmarking? The clever folks at the Commoncraft Show (one of my favorite tutorial sites) have a short video on Social Bookmarking! (they have videos on many, many technology topics…wonderful group).

Why use a social bookmarking site? In a blog post I wrote in March, 2011, Social Bookmarking Changed My Life (…well, my teaching) I wrote how I was introduced to the wonderful world of social bookmarking. I never had heard of itList (until I researched this blog), but I remember when Delicious came out! I thought it was ridiculous. Why would I want to share my bookmarks online? Good grief, it was 2003 and I had a Friendster account to connect with people! I wasn’t thinking it through, though. I was, for lack of a better word, foolish. Instead of using Delicious to sort the hundreds of bookmarks I used for work, I instead, hand coded those bookmarks in HTML in websites. !!! If I had been using Delicious, I could have hand coded ONE link: that, to my Delicious account!  I grew up, though, and finally started into the wonderful world of Social Bookmarking when I joined McREL. The instructor, Elizabeth Hubbell, instead of giving out a list of bookmarks, she instead gave her Diigo Links: http://www.diigo.com/network/erhubbell. That list led the group to ALL the workshop links, categorized  into lists and searchable by tags. I could “follow” Elizabeth and when she found interesting bookmarks and indexed them, I would have access. I finally figured out why I would want to do social bookmarking, and within minutes I had my OWN Diigo account (http://www.diigo.com/network/islandandy).

Diigo is a fantastic tool for education, and it’s FREE, although, as with most free services, there is a “premium” service that costs some coin. Education accounts, however, have some of the premium services, plus classroom services, and does not cost a thing. So how do I use Diigo? Well, I do a lot (LOT) of workshops in the United States and the Asia/Pacific around educational technology and in particular, McREL’s ClassroomInstruction That Works (nice plug, eh?). There are 9 instructional strategies, so for my workshops, I have 9 instructional lists! For example, when covering “Setting Objectives,” the first instructional strategy, I have people go right to: http://www.diigo.com/list/islandandy/settingobjectives. To make it easier, they click on it from a workshop website built in Google Sites (#43). So this is what it looks like:

The Setting Objectives list has 16 items in it. Rather than type out 16 URLs on the website AND annotate them, I use Diigo.

How easy is it? Pretty dang easy. Most of the web browsers have Diigo support so you can use it right from the browser. I use Firefox and it has a Diigo toolbar.

I wanted to add the itList information to a Diigo list, Social Bookmarking. I clicked the “Bookmark” button and up pops a window. From here, I can name the site, annotate the site and add it to a list or group.

When I have finished, the “Bookmark” button is now red, telling me that it is a website that I have in Diigo already. I can still click “Bookmark”, though, and edit the information, add to a list or group, etc.

Diigo is pretty slick! But wait! It gets better!

Groups are another feature of Diigo that are great for educators. No one person can keep abreast of the sheer massive amounts of information available on the web. Diigo allows users to participate in groups. Instead of one person finding information, it can be hundreds of people finding information. I belong to several Diigo groups: Web Tools forTeachers, Google in Education, Cliff’s Notes on EdTech, and Cliff’sNotes on Instructional Design. I even started my own group, iPad for Education. It has 199 members from all over the world, and all interested in using iPads in education! Think about that. I find a lot of information I save to Diigo on iPads in education, but this is 199 people helping me find information! Sure, not all of it is great, and not all group members contribute. Overall, though, I get a lot of great information from others and I share some, too. Groups can be public or private. My group is private, so people have to request membership (I want to keep out spammers), but the information is visible to everyone.

As an educational leadership tool, it is wonderful. A group of 2^nd grade teachers all create their own list within their school to share resources. A school has a new 1-to-1 laptop program, so the principal sets up a school group around 1:1 computing. A C&I director sets up a group for the district. It isn’t just around education, either. Health care, IT services, etc would all benefit from sharing resources through a social networking site like Diigo.

Want more information on Social Bookmarking? Well, in researching this article, I created a Diigo list: http://www.diigo.com/list/islandandy/Social-Bookmarking

By the way, I wrote this article in Word (#42), researched it with Google (#15), used Wikipedia (#11), saved it to Dropbox (#6), and posted it to WordPress (#4). With the exception of Word, all free, and all available to anyone with a computer and Internet connection…and could have used Open Office (#61) as a free alternative to Word. Flat.