I’ve wrestled with whether to post this now and add an additional post once the class has finished with the unit, or to wait and do all of this together. I decided to go with the first option for two reasons. First, I can lay out the pedagogical idea I had that led to using this particular social bookmark system in the classroom and then come back to the reception of my students. Second, I’m presenting this part of the program with hopes and expectations of what the outcome will be. I have preliminary feedback from my students, but nothing concrete, definite, or finalized. That will come with the second post on this topic.

In the fall, I ran across a new social bookmarking site–Diigo. I started using Diigo with a paper that I was writing and loved it for several reasons. First, it’s a social bookmarking site which meant that I could peruse the links of other people on the site. Second, Diigo gave me the Furl functionality of highlighting and annotating, but the format seemed easier and the interface was more aesthetically speaking (in my opinion).  While I was in this stage of tinkering, I met with one of my dissertation committee members and I was talking about the focus of my dissertation–blogging. He very bluntly reminded me that my entire dissertation could not focus only on blogging, but needed to be focused on more features. I was in a bind–I wanted to focus on the advantages to writing that came from blogs, not all medias. But the more I played around with Diigo, the more a little grain of an idea began to grow. My dissertation should note about the advantages to writing–but about collaboration through Web 2.0.

So, this semester, I went out on a limb and offered my students the option of collaborating on their research this semester. They were already not looking forward to the research, but the idea of using each other to further their research sounded like a good idea. Still, they weren’t jumping at the idea. Then, I gave them a quick walkthrough of Diigo. Their eyes lit up like they had just been given a present–and it wasn’t even their birthday. One student looked dumbfounded and asked:

“Is it really that easy?”

“It sure is.” I replied. So we set about installing the Diigo toolbar and they started on their research. But I’m leaving the student portion of this experiment here. (You have to want to come back, right?). Instead, I want to talk about the pedagogical approach to using social bookmarking–and Diigo especially–in classes that require research.

Students Use Social Bookmarking

Just like I learned with blogging in the classroom, I know that students get more out of methods of learning that they use in their free time. So, social bookmarking was a way for me to engage my students not only in the research, but in conversations with the research. Social bookmarking, regardless of the site used, creates a conversation among members interested in the same tag. Each time a member marks a bookmark, they are speaking to their networks and saying “Read this.”

Annotation is Suddenly Fun

Each semester, I try (in vain, usually) to get my students to annotate their text book. I do this to prepare them not only for future studies, but also for the annotation that research demands they do. Diigo, suddenly, makes the students want to annotate their bookmarks. It is their chance to make sure the world (or their group) knows how important specific words on a webpage are to them.

Diigo allows a More Advanced Conversation

As I mentioned above, social bookmarking allows students to engage in a conversation with other scholars on the same topic. Diigo allows this conversation to move beyond just the “Read this” comment and actually allows the students to create a dialogue. Through Diigo, students have a variety of ways to engage in this dialogue.

• Creating Groups–creating groups of individuals within their network who are researching on the same topic allows students to share bookmarks they have found.
• Using Forums–Within a group, the administrator has the opportunity to create a forum that allows each member of the group to ask and respond to specific issues on a topic. For example, if one student cannot find statistics, they can mention this in the forum and receive an answer (or better yet, a bookmark) from one of the group members.
• Highlighting–This allows one student to specifically show others in the group what they find important about the bookmark. But the highlights are not owned or seen by just the individual. If John shares a bookmark with highlighting, Frank can not only see John’s highlighting, but can also add his own highlighting (which is also available to John).
• Sticky Notes–In addition to highlighting, students can add to the conversation on the page. Their comments can be seen by others who read the page (if the notes are public) and their friends can add to this conversation.

Now, I’m looking at the benefits to what happens when students alone share bookmarks. However, keep in mind that in the most public realm, these conversations can be looked at and added to by anybody else in the Diigo network. Therefore, students have the chance to get information from even more sources.

Now, in the grand tradition of my previous hows and whys, I want to look at how I assigned this to my students. This is a bit complex, but I’ll try to simplify it. It’s also very heavily geared towards a rhetoric focused First Year Composition that spends the entire semester focusing on research.

Assignment Part One–Bookmarking

In the first part of the assignment, I asked students to complete research with Internet sources through specific search engines (Google, Internet Public Library,  and the Librarians Index to the Internet). I told them to simply bookmark and tag any site or article that looked usable in research. (At this point, my students were working with three controversial topics, so they were doing research on three different topics.

Assignment Part Two–Sharing Bookmarks and Creating Subgroups

In class the day students were to turn in their bookmarks, I simply had students log in to Diigo and then share their bookmarks to the class group. Then, I asked them to get together with those who were writing on the same topic (they also chose their final topic in class this day) and create a subgroup for their topic. Then, I asked them to share their bookmarks on their final topic with their group and to browse through the class bookmarks for other bookmarks on their topic. This way, they also had the bookmarks from people who had researched the topic, but not chosen it as their final topic. So, essentially each person in the group had the opportunity to get research from up to 10 other students.

Assignment Part Three–Evaluating the Sources via Sticky Notes

For this part of the assignments, students are to go through each of the sources in their group and create sticky notes throughout the essay to identify the author’s use of the three rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos). Then, I’ve asked them to post a sticky at the bottom evaluating the source and explaining how this specific article would fit into their argumentative essay. (What students are not aware of at this point is that this step is essentially creating their annotated bibliography–the next step in the research process for this class).

Final Thoughts

Each of my students is also linked to my Diigo account, so they can see how I interact with the site itself. I’ve encouraged them to look through the bookmarks and ask questions about why I do specific things on my sites. If they’ve kept up, they had the chance to see my resources double for a class that I’m taking as well as for links for future posts on the blog.

Feel free to poke around through their group and visit Diigo if you haven’t. You can see the 1023-Collaborative Group without an account and you can see what the students are doing with their bookmarks. Or, you can see my pubic bookmarks. If you are a Diigo user (or decide to become one), feel free to join my new Diigo group for TRC.  As always, please let me know if you have questions or need feedback. But  more importantly, let me know if you try this in your classroom. I’d love to know how it goes.

Happy Techno-Teaching