Introduction

This section examines the educational use of social bookmarking. Services that are examples of this category allow users to collect, organize, and annotate bookmarks to online resources, search this collection at a later time, AND in most cases share this collection or at least parts of it with others. Offering a curated and commented list of resources to others satisfies our definition of a participatory practice.

Diigo

Diigo offers a great example of the social bookmarking category. We are able to only scratch the surface of its capabilities and features here. We will describe both how to use Diigo to collect, organize, and annotate resources for your own use use and how to share your collection with others (including a designated group of students).

Using Diigo

Diigo Home Page

The following image shows the appearance of the initial page you will encounter when connecting to the Diigo site. The initial page will show recently added bookmarks with the most recent additions appearing at the top.

The image we provide shows a couple of bookmark entries. Each entry includes the link to the original site and content highlighted on the original site or added as an annotation. Typically, a user also adds tags. These tags provide a convenient method for organizing and searching stored resources. As your collection of bookmarks grows, finding something becomes increasingly challenging. This is where tags (and the organization of bookmarks into Notebooks - not discussed here) become important.

In the upper left hand corner of the home page is the add button. If entering a new bookmark from the home page (using the browser), this button brings up a blank template for entering information.

Individual Entry

There are several components of each entry. These components include:

• the title of the web page (automatically inserted based on the address - URL - entered)
• a comment provided by the author of the entry and any content highlighted from the site
• tags assigned by the author of the entry

Once saved in Diigo, the title of the entry is "active" - clicking on the title will take you to the web site associated with the bookmark. Being able to find your way back to web sites you value is the main purpose of saving a collection of bookmarks.

There are a couple of other items that will become important when we discuss the social capabilities of Diigo. By default bookmarks are public, but you can mark a bookmark as private if you wish. Entries marked as private cannot be viewed without logging into your account. If you are a member of a group (or several groups), the menu appearing near the bottom of the form allows you to share this bookmark with a group.

In daily practice, I seldom enter a new bookmark by copying the web address of a site into the template displayed here. Plugins for popular browsers allow a much more convenient approach. As an example, the Diigo Web Collector extension for Chrome adds an icon to the Chrome browser header and capabilities to the browser (see image below). For example, text highlighted as you read will be stored when you save the bookmark to Diigo.

Icon appearing in the bookmark bar of browser: Selecting this icon reveals a menu and allows storage of information relevant to page active in the browser.

Highlight text and then click the pen icon

A bookmark will be created in Diigo. This entry will store the highlighted content. Additional information such as your personal notes or tags can then be added to the record.

What makes Diigo a SOCIAL bookmarking tool?

Diigo is a powerful and multifaceted tool and our exploration must be limited in scope and approach. Recognize that there are typically multiple ways to use the many capabilities of Diigo. We will focus on the sharing of resources.

Diigo offers multiple ways to learn from and with others. One way to explore several of these options is to examine the subheadings under the Discover menu.

Under the Discover menu header there are two options - Community and Network. Selecting Community produces a list of recent popular bookmarks, but more importantly offers a search window. If you know what you are looking for, enter a search query and you will find what others have bookmarked on that topic. The popularity of a given bookmark returned from your query is indicated and you might use this as an measure of the value of the bookmarked page (the logic here is similar to one variable Google uses in ranking search results). 

Elsewhere we describe the difference between search and discovery (see the section on bookmarking as a participatory tool). In search, you are purposefully looking for something. In our example, we were searching for resources on the topic of cyberbullying. In contrast, discovery implies an encounter with something likely to be of interest, but not something that was specifically sought. The Network option might be better described as discovery. This options provides a list of the most recent bookmarks by those you follow.

Following is common with many online social services and it works a little differently with each service. Basically, it implies that when you follow you will have access to the resources another user of that service has committed to share publicly.

There are multiple ways to identify Diigo users to follow. Here is one approach.

Locate the Add People to Follow section on the right hand side of the Network page. You want to search for users of interest.

You can search for users to follow in a variety of ways. I either search for names I know or search by tag. The tag search allows the identification of users who have tagged bookmarks with a term of interest.

Now, the process becomes subjective. The search should provide access to the public bookmarks of multiple individuals. I typically take a look at the information individuals provide, the number of bookmarks with the tag of interest, and how many individuals follow a person in finding individuals to follow.

Accessing the site of a Diigo user should reveal a Follow button.

The idea in the social process is that by examining the bookmarks stored and annotated by a Diigo user with similar interests you can discover resources unfamiliar to you.

When you have identified other users to follow, returning to the Network page will list recent bookmarks saved by these individuals. You can even save these bookmarks to your personal account.