Social Bookmarking - The Diigo Digital Civilization Group

Of all the digital tools I have learned, I think social bookmarking to be among the most regularly useful. It has brought order to all the constant surfing and research I do online. It's not that hard to learn, and you'll end up getting more mileage out of your online work.

Dr. Zappala uses the delicio.us bookmarking service, which is great. I have been using Diigo. We've decided to require students to learn and use Diigo because it is well suited for academic purposes. I'm glad that Kevin has posted about Diigo and has an account going already. We'd like you to get an account and then join the Digital Civilization bookmarking group I've set up on Diigo. Read on for more of an explanation and instructions on getting started.


What's Diigo?
Diigo is a social bookmarking, annotation, and research tool. It's cloud-based, so you can access anything you've bookmarked from any Internet connection -- through the Diigo website, or through a Diigo browser toolbar, or through something called the "Diigolet." You can also publish your bookmarks through a widget. To the side of this blog you can see the bookmark stream from our Digital Civilization Diigo group.

I love the way this service combines all three aspects of digital literacy -- consume, create, and connect. At its simplest, Diigo can simply help you keep better track of web content and be a better consumer of online information (as a cloud-based bookmarking system). But it also allows you to add annotations to web pages (via highlighting or sticky notes) or to tag and annotate your bookmarks. In other words, it isn't just for passively consuming or archiving information for personal retrieval; Diigo gives you a way to add content and value to the web by filtering sites for others. And of course, that leads to the social or connecting aspect of Diigo. You can friend and follow people on Diigo, or you can join subject-oriented bookmark groups, like this Classroom 2.0 bookmark group I follow on Diigo, or of course our own bookmark group.

Getting Started
Click here to be taken to my own bookmarks on Diigo. Actually, this takes you just to those entries in my bookmark stream that are tagged both "diigo" and "tutorial." It would be a good idea for you to watch the video to which one of them links, and to go through the slideshow on the other one of these. These get into some advanced features that you won't need to master, but learn the basics about how to annotate web pages, bookmark them, tag them, and save them to the course Diigo group. Once you've made your own account, go to the our course group (search for it or click the image below), and click on the blue "join this group" button.

You should learn about the Diigo toolbar (or, alternatively, the "Diigolet") and install either of these on your customary browser. This enables you to have a simple button set on your browser through which you can bookmark, share, access your Diigo library, etc. Below is an image of what comes up when I click on the bookmark button on the Diigo toolbar. You can see where I added tags, and also clicked the box to be sure to add the bookmark to the group's set, not just my own.

Start posting your discoveries relevant to our course topics to our class Diigo group, then watch them show up on the widget here on the side of this blog (or go to the Group Widgets page, get your own embed code, and put the bookmark stream on your own blog). That's when your "create" starts becoming someone else's better quality "consume" because you have "connected" your web browsing and filtering with others through social bookmarking.