Undoubtedly social bookmarking is a powerful tool that educators need to begin using to leverage their learning. Imagine if a critical mass of Grade 3 teachers or senior high Mathematics educators, throughout a district, province or state, began sharing their educationally-relevant bookmarks. Do you not think that the benefit to individuals would be outstanding? In fact, I believe that social bookmarking might become the necessary catalyst to help educators move towards a more formal professional learning community.

In our “23 Things” project, each participant was asked in “Thing 15” to explore social bookmarking and, in particular, investigate the Delicious bookmark sharing application.

About two years ago, John Evans, a colleague in my professional learning network, suggested that I begin using Delicious and start sharing bookmarks with him. When I examined the plethora of “favourites” in my Internet Explorer, I felt the task to be too overwhelming to convert. I must admit that I had often bookmarked the same web site in two different folders in case I was not able to find the site when I need it. In fact, now that I reflect, I was actually using a rudimentary “tagging” system by placing an important web site in two or more differently named folders so that I could more easily locate the site rather than have to always find the unique path to the site through a single bookmark entry.

About eight months ago, John suggested that I move over to a new social bookmarking system called Diigo. As he put it, “Diigo is Delicious on steroids”. In fact, the following blog entries compare Delicious and Diigo suggesting that Diigo is perhaps the up-and-coming social bookmarking network:

I must admit that I still was reluctant to attempt to move all my Internet Explorer favourites, which I had collected over the space of about 6 years, to either Delicious or Diigo. However, about six months ago, I recently started using Firefox, while exploring the creation of a personal WordPress blog as well as  preparing for participating in the “23 Things” project.

When Shelley Paul, the coordinator of 23 Things, suggested, in Thing 15, that participants who “are feeling brave” could import their existing bookmarks into Delicious, I decided it was finally time to take action. Since I had started using Diigo about two months ago, I decided that I would use my time that I would normally reserve for Delicious exploration, to better understand how to use Diigo. Feeling somewhat “brave” I decided to import my existing Firefox bookmarks into Diigo and spent an hour or so renaming folders to tags and consolidating tag entries into somewhat of a standard.

Diigo is designed to facilitate the three major functions of:

  • Research
  • Share
  • Collaborate

As a new user of Diigo, I am still working my way through the intricacies of the “Research” component. I must admit that I feel that the tagging process is definiely a superior way for locating bookmarked and favourite sites. Futhermore, the Diigo “tag cloud” is a powerful way to visualize the tags that one uses and helps maintain consistency. However, the ability to highlight passages on a web site or add sticky notes to archived web pages is a tool that most educators will find extremely beneficial. An old adage states that “a picture is worth 1000 words” and, as a visual learner, I really appreciate the ability of Diigo to allow one to take a “snapshot” of the web page that one is archiving.

True, I have not had the opportunity to work though the other two major components of “Sharing” or “Collaboration” but I firmly believe that Diigo has the functionality and potential features that I can learn to use effectively to work smarter. I eagerly look forward to the opportunity to leverage my learning with other like-minded educators by sharing resources and collaborating using Diigo.

Take care & keep smiling :-)