DIIGO gets my EGO. . .

Week 7 Thing 10  Learning 2.0

After watching the Diigo tutorial, I thought that it appeared to be fun, organized and efficient. It's a great idea to store everything in your "cloud" and be able to access the same personalized information from different electronic devices and not miss a beat.

My first thought was that Diigo would work best for those who could afford and actually use different technological devices and for those who as the tutorial said are high consumers of online information.

Upon initial use of my brand new Diigo account I felt a little lost and overwhelmed. I used the help menu and tried a tutorial of the toolbar for starters, but it seemed like there should have been a video tutorial but nothing materialized, so I ended up scrolling down to the written tutorial and it was okay, but not as detailed as I would have liked so it wasn't very helpful. I looked through some other tutorial subjects and it was the same thing.

I did like the Diigo toolbar versus the Diigolet that you install on your browser's toolbar.  I liked the ability to capture, highlight, filter and mark items "to read".  I love the fact you can just save snippets of things you read as well and add personal notes.

So I just clicked everywhere to see what things did.  I finally found the drop down Diigo Menu that listed my library, lists, groups etc.   Then I saw the "hot bookmark" option and started there.

The hot bookmark option brought up the hottest articles, searched items that had been bookmarked by other Diigo users and it listed how many users had bookmarked the article.  I actually found a great article related to 21st Century Learners and tried to bookmark it myself and highlight a few things on there.  I don't have any other devices such as an ipad, or iphone etc. to test out my Diigo findings on this article. I may have to borrow one from someone. :)

I didn't get far with Diigo bookmarking one article, but I can absolutely see the capability of it's applications in a library media center that is equipped with adequate technology.  It would be wonderful to have students collaborate as a group on Diigo on a research project, or to just have a "club" that is interested in a certain subject where they can have a virtual outlet for their interests. It also provides another type of technological media format for students to delve into, however I can see that it may not be for all students. There may be some students who in the instance of reading may only read manga, and in the case with Diigo, there may be students who like using technology for online communications, but only like facebook.

As far as personal research it would make organizing and categorizing information much simpler and allow you to see what others have found on the same kind of research. Diigo would be able to put all that information in one place instead of bookmarking tons of websites on your browser.

 I think for me, it would take some time before I felt comfortable with Diigo.  I would absolutely need a good reason to use it personally and would use it more professionally, as I noticed a lot of the users, at least in the 21st Century Learner article I pulled up were educators and/or professionals in that field.