EDUC 6816 Activity 4 Diigo

1. Do other people's annotations add to your understanding of content or hinder it?  Reading another person’s annotations allows for confirmation of my own perspective, and provides a perspective that is opposite of mine and requires analysis to process this new idea.  Annotations are similar to taking notes and the benefits allow the reader to quickly review the main concepts of the resource. In regards to understanding content or hindering it, I believe that it depends on the format for the annotation.  If the annotation is made using a specific tool, like Diigo, then collaboration is possible, and communicating with others allows for a clearer picture to be presented.

2. Provide an example of a Diigo annotation that in your view is useful rather than spamish. The following annotation by Hilary is a great example presenting an alternative perspective of using Diigo.  It provides the reader with other learning management systems that could be useful, or possibly intriguing enough  to search for more information. The components of a brief description, an alternate idea, and a conclusion are all present in this annotation.  “A teacher created this video to show his students how to use Diigo and explain how they will be using it in their English class.  Basically, this teacher is having students create a Blog post and then use the class Diigo group to share that week's assignment (found in their blog).  I think there are better ways to do this same assignment using learning management systems such as Schoology, Edmodo, EngradePro.  The blog, the comments, the social bookmarking can all happen in one location with these systems.”  

3. How did you use tags to make searching more efficient and beneficial? Tags are beneficial in organizing information, flexibility in rearranging the information, and allowing the reader to locate content related to a given tag.  The Diigo  library allows the user to choose the tag for each category to be added and provides the feature “top tags” and “my tags”.  Our 6816 Diigo group shows the top 10 tags on the right-side of the group page. Once you click on a top ten tag, then a list of related tags, selected tags, and related searches appear.  These tags allow you to navigate more efficiently in our Diigo group. 

4.In your opinion what is the potential of social bookmarking to promote content area learning and/or information literacy.  Social bookmarking allows the vast amount of information accessible to the user to be electronically organized and accessed from a device with internet capability.  Information literacy encompasses being able to organize the information around us. Using social bookmarking in content area learning has numerous possibilities.  For example, Diigo provides educator accounts with clear directions for using the site with students.  Diigo is a Web 2.0 tool allowing for group collaboration in and out of the classroom. Educators can present information within the Diigo group, leave sticky notes, highlight, and moderate the online conversations between students, and also share Diigo lessons with other educators. Imagine the learning that would take place if students could actually be part of creating the content, and having the support of peers/teacher in learning the content. Diigo would be a perfect platform to use for Project-Based Learning.   As we are learning about the 21^st Century workforce in this course in relation to information literacy, the belief is, our future students will need the skills of using Web 2.0 to organize, analyze, synthesize and communicate information.