http://www.diigo.com

The basics

Diigo pitches itself thus: “If you browse or read a lot on the web, we believe you will find Diigo indispensable. Diigo is two services in one — it is a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other.”

Diigo is one of the most organised and effective systems for making more out of the classic online habit of bookmarking favourite websites. Diigo has developed significantly in the past few years and has, in many ways, outstripped Delicious, the first and best of these social bookmarking services. Diigo now has many distinctive features, including a very close integration with actual browsers (both on computers and other devices), though these downloadable widgets and plugins may not suit educational uses on campus.

Using Diigo is simple – even if not using the bookmarking plugins within a browser, it is simply about storing, annotating, tagging and organising collections of web-based references (both sites and other digital information from the web). These collections can be authored individually or by groups; they can shared with everyone, some people, or kept private. The heart of Diigo is the relationship between individuals, groups, networks, a relationship created out of the shared content.

A key part of Diigo is that it allows you to highlight and sticky-note websites… of course, these annotations are not part of the actual site but, once connected to the Diigo server, it will remember what you have done and re-present it to you. The idea of annotating the web has been around for a very long time (Diigo started life as Odigo, in the early 2000s, a service which offered such annotation).

What is intriguing

The intriguing aspect of Diigo and, indeed, of all collaborative resource management / annotation / curation services, is whether or not collective and collaborative information seeking is better or worse (especially in a learning context) than individual work. To be more specific, Diigo best implements the capability of the web to connect individuals who, while working individually and without significant pre-arranged plans or organisational processes as a group, can nevertheless function as a collective: the sum total of individual results becomes the ‘group’ and it is potentially more significant and richer than if they had worked alone, while not being weighed down with the business of managing the collective. The crowd, as we might term this group, is not wise per se: but the wisdom of the crowd emerges from individual people when the output of each individual is aggregated.

Diigo offers a lot: and the capacity to annotate or otherwise interact with website in a persistent manner most closely replicates the kind of behaviour people naturally do with pen and paper when reading. The act of creating summaries of information, of categorising them, of tagging or annotating them, especially in the context of communicating this information to others is very powerful for learning.

Pedagogic Challenge

Many academics are already experimenting with Diigo groups as a way of getting students to engage more actively in the process of finding, assessing and assimilating information resources. Diigo would provide a natural environment for any kind of assignment work that emphasises resource acquisition, for inquiry-based learning, rather than content assilimiation. The challenge however is that students can become focused too much on collecting links and adding them to the general pool; they often lack skills in assessing and refining what is found. The ease with which Diigo allows material to be found, categorised and shared can also stop people from exercising critical judgment as to whether it should be.

So, the challenge with Diigo is to find a way to use the communicative, conversational features as a place where the teacher can provide feedback, error correction and advice on the work of students. Feedback therefore comes during the task, not on its completion. Further, students could be motivated to see that the collection and analysis of resources is not an end in itself: linking use of a novel activity (Diigo resource collection) to a more traditional one (a research essay) might solve the challenges of introducing this new way of working for students.

Some insight into the use of Diigo can be found in Estells and Del Moral. (2010). Social Bookmarking Tools as Facilitators of Learning and Research Collaborative Processes: The Diigo Case, Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects Volume 6.

Why this tool is not ‘top 10′

Diigo has many facets and affordances: it probably requires a browser-based plugin to be properly effective and certain key features require payment. While these two facts don’t damage its general applicability (indeed it is probably better that it have these features), it does not therefore entirely suit the needs for knowledge network learning applications, where freedom to use and no requirement to download are generally important.

However, Diigo does see its key role in education and has features designed to enable teachers to control and manage student groups using Diigo. Perhaps, however, this misses the point: a really great tool should work for knowledge network learning without specialised educational features.

Alternatives

Delicious is discussed at this site as the simpler, easier alternative; Mendeley is worth a look too, for more serious scholarly researchers who want to manage their reading and bibliographies in a social way. Mendeley is not the same as Diigo and Delicious but has the same underlying principle: one individual’s research / resource management work is far more valuable if shared and connected to others.