Social Bookmarking

One of the great things about taking a course is that you are sometimes forced to look at things you would not have considered before; or in my case to revisit tools that I have yet to integrate into my digital life. It is little bit like eating more vegetables. You know you should because it is so good for you and you know they don't taste bad but for some reason you just don't get around to it or make it part of your regular diet.

Delicious is the Easier Option

I have used Delicious just occassionally over the past few years. My main obstacle to using it has been the locked down profiles in my workplace that does not allow me to place the bookmarking tool onto my toolbar.  Yes it is a bit lame but that is my excuse and I am sticking to it.  I can't explain why I don't use it on my home computer (maybe it was because I got a new laptop and haven't set it up yet--oh that was  already 2 years ago). It embarasses me that I have not worked harder to eliminate this road block at work. I think I am motivated again to talk to my school district's technology support and see if a solution is possible. When I look at it now if I use the feature that just adds a link to my Favorites Bar rather than the toolbar option I should be okay. I have encountered some student profiles don't allow the Favorites Bar to show by default.

There is not doubt that managing bookmarks or favorites is way too cumbersome these days, especially when you use mutliple computers. From what I have experienced of Delicious and Diigo, Delicious is the easier social bookmarking service to get your head around.  If you are going to engage in social bookmarking only for your own personal needs I think this is the way to go if you don't want to be overwhelmed. You don't even need to take advantage of the social networking component to benefit from this resource. However you probably don't want to miss out on the opportunity to tap into the "collective intelligence" that is out there (Choosing Web 2.0 Tools for Learning and Teaching in the Digital World p. 46).

A great feature of Delicious that I just activated is linking it to my Twitter account.  Everytime a good web resource is tweeted to me it automatically is added to my Delicious account. The websites are automatically tagged that they came from Twitter. I will need to regularly add other tags to these new resources or else I may end up with a backlog that I cannot face.  It you don't add more tags to these resources there is little point in using this service. 

 

Importing Internet Explorer Favorites into Delicious

If you are new to Delicious you might want to look at the brief screencast I just made about importing your favorites into Delicious. I have made this instructional screencast using Jing to show how to put your favorites from Internet Explorer into Delicious. I suspect most browsers have similiar export features.

Diigo Can be Used Everywhere

Diigo is the full meal deal of social bookmarking as far as I can see and ultimately is where teachers should really end up. Delicious has all the basics covered with unlimited tagging and the ability to follow and be followed by others.  If you are not an educator, student or academic that is probably all you would ever need or want. As an educator if want to see where Web 2.0 is really going then Diigo is it. But don't worry you don't need to give up on all you have done in Delicious. You can link your Diigo account to Delicious so everytime you add something to Diigo it is added in Delicious as well. Unfortunately it is not a reciprocal arrangment. You can however export all your bookmarks, tags and all, from Delicious and then import them into Diigo. It took a number of hours before the import into Diigo was complete when I did this.

I am an iPhone and iPad user and Diigo has apps for both of these devices. This makes social bookmarking a reality in all situations since all of my uses of technology are covered.

Diigo Annotates

What Diigo can do in terms of annotation of actual webpages and creating dialogue among users is staggering. See my example of annotating a webpage below.

In the section above about Delicious, I put a hyperlink to the title of Berger and Trexler's book about choosing Web 2.0 tools. The link goes to a wiki that has the book listed among other resources. If we were linked together with Diigo you might have seen that I highlighted the information about the book and added a sticky note.

Diigo Has an Educator's Account

My brain really began to hurt when I started to read about Diigo in Will Richardson's book Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Using social bookmarking in a classroom enivronment had remained a mystery to me. I couldn't figure out the logistics. I must say Richardson's description of using Diigo in the classroom made me want to run for the hills. It seemed too difficult.

I discovered that that Diigo has changed since Richardson's book came out in 2010. I am surprised that Berger and Trexler do not highlight this option in any clear fashion either since their book came out in 2012. There is an educator version of Diigo that you can sign up for once you have created a basic account. There is teacher console in the educator version that allows you to set up your own class of users.  Students don't even need email accounts! That is pretty exciting if you are teaching in an elementary school. The teacher console will automatically generate user IDs and passwords when you type in student names. I can't wait to try it. I am a little concerned about what roadblocks I will encounter in a network setting with locked down profiles.

Diigo Tagroll

Seeing your tags in cloud form is pretty powerful. I can tell just by looking at the tagroll what tags I need to fix or get rid of. I can think of other tags I now want to use. You can have them show up on websites and on your blog. I put the tagroll below since I couldn't get it into my sidebar. Once again I am finding Blogger a pretty clunky application when it comes to adding widgets/gadgets and other such items.  I needed to paste the java script into the HTML of my blog. It was even missing some HTML which fortunately I have some rudimentary knowledge of so I could add the missing piece.

 

My Diigo Tags