BP_Diigo_Group

My wife is an MBA student at Cornell University. All summer she has been lugging around an oddly sized bag that contains her laptop and a thick binder that holds together all her course notes. Today evening, I saw her furiously highlighting and scribbling pencil comments all over her course notes. Being a new convert to Diigo, courtesy my Full Sail class, I remarked to her, if you use Diigo, you can highlight articles with four different colors, make notes all over your article and you wouldn't have to lug around that big binder either!  Her comment was "Wow! that's powerful!" That was precisely my thought, when I first learned about Diigo. 


Before being sold on how powerful Diigo's was, I wanted to check if Diigo could replace my existing use of Google Docs for a personal research project on eLearning.

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In order to get familiar with eLearning, I had been using a Google Docs spreadsheet that I called "eLearning Familiarization" to record and manage useful eLearning articles and links. To put some structure around it, I had  columns for "Website", "What they do" and "Comments".

I created a group called eLearning_ed4ever within Diigo and bookmarked the links that I had been storing on the Google Docs spreadsheet. While bookmarking, Diigo allows you to Title the link, comment on it and describe it. 


I quickly found that Diigo might just have a universal appeal - it can cater to different types of research personalities. In adherence to a secret color coding scheme that has been passed down generations within my family, I was thrilled to find that I could highlight text within the article in four different colors. I could also choose to share links and articles among all my friends and neighbors, whom I really liked. For the researchers who belong to the "all weblinks will break one day" cult, Diigo allows you to take a snapshot of the entire article that it stores as html file documents. For the procrastinating researchers, who love finding good stuff to read but keep putting away the reading part, Diigo has a "Read Later" option, that will prompt you with a similarly named tab, on the left of the screen. 

Another outstanding feature in Diigo is the Sticky Note. If you always wanted to scribble notes on library books but were afraid to get fined, Diigo solves this issue with a very slick sticky note feature. It stores your comments in a little box with a number on it, and they don't interfere with the actual article text. Check the visual on the left - you should barely be able to see the little sticky note box, leave alone what's inside it.

If I must criticize Diigo, it has to be about it's slow server response. Though I had a fast internet connection, Diigo was very slow in playing Vimeo tutorial videos and also on picture uploads. Also, Safari is not the best browser to use for Diigo. This is because Safari, unlike other browsers does not support Diigo Toolbar which allows you to access all of Diigo's features. Safari only supports Diigolet, a much trimmed down version of Diigo Toolbar, because it offers only bookmarking and highlighting. 


I have no doubts about the utility of Diigo as a recording, managing and networking research tool. It offers me much more than what storing research information on a Google Docs spreadsheet does.  I'm looking forward to using Diigo for my Action Research project on the use of Gaming and Virtual Worlds in Education. Hope to see you on Diigo too!.