International Relations....Diigo Collaborative Reading and Research.

 We kicked off the year with a technology integration partnership for using Diigo Social Bookmarking as a tool for collaboration in reading and in the development of a research databank. Caitlin decided to explore this tool that we have been talking about for some time last year right at the beginning of her new International Relations class, setting the tone for how students will manage reading.

A Diigo group was created for the class and the students were invited to the group. The first activity involved using the powerful Diigo toolbar to collectively highlight an articled shared/bookmarked by the teacher. Therefore, all students in the class were able to read and highlight the same article, keeping a record of their activity for later access. The screenshot below shows the web article with highlights.



The students then started their own research, adding individual bookmarks to be shared with the class. Together with the highlights, it is also possible to add "sticky notes". In the image below we can see the Diigo view of a student bookmark, indicating all the highlights ( at the top of each box) and the corresponding sticky note comment (showing next to the student name). The same highlights and sticky notes can be viewed at the bookmarked  web article itself.


Students are also learning how to collectively create tags for their bookmarks. You can see below that two tags were used: Economy, Superstition. As the research database grows, they will have to be mindful of the tags already created by classmates and use those when necessary. This type of tagging is called folksonomy. 


It will be exciting to follow the developments with Diigo!




Comments

  1. ColleenAugust 9, 2012 at 3:41 AM

    I love how this tool is highlighted through a learning lens - and I see such clear links to the ICT standards. Although at first glance this seems to align to Information Fluency, it clearly reflects a student's growing skill set about the communication ideas to multiple audiences. Wouldn't it be great to include students from other schools to participate? How can we find other programs that would be investigating similar issues?

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  2. smeneghAugust 13, 2012 at 2:23 PM

    It is an interesting idea to share a Diigo Group with another school. It is a great tool for gathering different perspectives on a single theme. This tool also allows exploring ICT standards on research, in particular the evaluation of information sources. As students bookmark their own search results they can have a short evaluation of the site as part of the blurb that describes it for the others.

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