Social Bookmarking

This morning, I was thinking about my next grad class and how I would continue our “searching”, “researching”, “looking for professional resources”, etc. conversation. We are going to discuss organizing our Internet-based information and I’d like to use del.icio.us to do that with my students. I had been using delicious for a while as a bookmarking service. I love it (and the firefox menu bar that I downloaded to my browser is great!). HOWEVER, I know that diigo also does social bookmarking. I also have been using diigo for a while, but only in this way: I use diigo to highlight key points in an article on the web, add sticky notes, and then share w/ a colleague. She can see my highlights/notes and add hers, etc. It’s collaborative notetaking, research, thinking, etc. I decided to do a little research to see how I should present this to my students.

First, I did a search on google that looked like this: delicious vs. diigo. The first few hits were all I needed to dive into my research.
Here are some of the first few links that appeared:
1. http://www.diigo.com/help/why_diigo (biased of course!)
2. A post from Will Richardson: http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/diigo-and-delicious/
3. http://techfridge.blogspot.com/2008/01/diigo-cant-say-it-but-we-like-it.html
4. http://christytucker.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/diigo-or-delicious-for-beginners/ (This post echoed my “gut” instincts to go w/ delicious first!)
So, I’ve made my decision. We’ll learn del.icio.us as a whole group. (And of course, they can also watch the Common Craft video on del.icio.us for more help.) Those students who have used del.icio.us before can explore diigo and then share with us.

There’s something else very important that I want to note: As I was reading Will Richardson’s post, I was very excited. This is the type of blog post that I want my students to read, learn from, and write for this course. This is modern day Web 2.0 research! There is so much to learn just from this one blog post. Here are my questions for my students as they read Richardson’s post and the corresponding comments. They are entering the realm of Research 2.0 (that’s what I’d like to call it!). After reading Will Richardson’s post, from a professional development standpoint, Where will you go from here? What do you want to learn more about? How will you find the information? How will you use it professionally/in your classroom?