iterativelearning

The social bookmarking service, Diigo, enjoyed some good exposure with a Robert Scoble interview this past July. Diigo features quite a few tools and one that I’ve appreciated the most is the annotation tool (e.g., highlighting, sticky notes) and this is one area in which I think they really distinguish themselves from Delicious. Another distinctive feature to Diigo is that one of its target audiences has been educators and this makes sense given the popularity of social bookmarking tools among educators.

Now Diigo is offering special Educator accounts where teachers can create social bookmarking groups for their individual classes. As a complement to this, they offer some helpful privacy features in which preferences can be configured to limit communication to just those in the class. It doesn’t cost anything and the ads that appear are limited to education-related sponsors. Depending on the kind of reception they get with this new move, there might be a significant percentage of educators out there who would be more than willing to pay a small, reasonable fee for an ad-free option.

Matthew Ingram has a good, thought-provoking post on the relevance of social bookmarking. Because these tools make bookmarking so easy, it’s equally easy to accumulate a pile of urls that make it difficult to locate that site you’re looking for when you’re scrambling to meet a deadline. Yet, as an academic, I still find social bookmarking tools pretty useful. I like being able to locate a resource that I’ve bookmarked regardless of where I’m at or which computer I’m on.

Although, I think technically speaking it’s not a social bookmarking tool, Zotero, seems to be moving in that kind of direction with its upcoming sync tool.

I also like the potential for social bookmarking tools as a teaching tool; especially when I teach in online environments, the option of creating resource-sharing networks or groups can help build community. One relatively new player in the social bookmarking scene, at least to me, is Diigo. Among many of the standard features, it allows you to create private groups, which some faculty and/or students prefer when it comes to resource-sharing.