Social bookmarking with Diigo

I'm continually struck by the intellectual communities that develop in my online courses. I stress intellectual communities, because so much of their relationships end up being framed around their work in the course, around their writing and conversations. (To the online instruction naysayers: I wonder perhaps if these relationships are even more intellectually robust than onsite communities, based as they are around reading and writing.)

I think a major component of my role as Online Writing Teacher (it's been a while, so I figure I'm due for an eponymous shout-out) is to provide my students with digital tools to help facilitate these types of connections. Social bookmarking applications are great for this. There are a numerous options and they are all straightforward, but I particularly like Diigo.

What is Diigo? Diigo is Web-based tool that helps you organize, categorize, and share Websites and other content. The Diigo About page lays it out nicely:

Much of our information consumption and research, whether at home or at work, has shifted online. We are now spending a big part of our day working with online information - reading and researching related to travel, health, shopping, career, hobbies, news, online learning, smart investing, school papers, work projects, you name it.

Yet the workflow with information, from browsing, reading, researching, annotating, storing, . organizing, remembering, collaborating, sharing, to connecting dots into knowledge, is still largely ad-hoc and inefficient. Diigo is here to streamline the information workflow and dramatically improve your productivity....

Like most of us, every day I get tons of emails with links to stuff that I want to remember or save, but I don’t always have a good, efficient way to file/store that information.With Diigo, you can save content and then mark it with tags and commentary and easily store sites by category. And you can readily share everything with others.

All of this functionality makes Diigo excellent for your classes. Using the free teacher console, you can create a Diigo group for your class and invite students to it in a non-intrusive way. From there, you and your students can easily share materials, annotate them, and tag them. Group members receive a once-a-day email update so you don’t have to remember to go and seek out the info. Of course, while students are working with Diigo, they are also learning about the possibilities for sharing such material in digital environments, thinking through rationales for identifying, tagging, and categorizing content as well as being introduced to other communities of learners.
 
I think it's a valuable, powerful tool. On this site, a teacher-blogger describes "13 reasons teachers should use Diigo," including that Diigo "has tools that encourage students to collaborate with others to analyze, critique, and evaluate websites" and that "by joining groups of like-minded users... Diigo allows you to gain access to the ‘collective intelligence’ of the internet." Teaching online leads us, inevitably, I think, into issues of how to manage digital content, and the goals of our instruction need to includ facilitating conversations about how to talk about that information. Social bookmarking tools like Diigo help us accomplish those goals more effectively.