Module #7 Building Online Communities

Having once attempted to join del.icio.us years ago and not using it effectively in my classroom I decided to explore Diigo. “Diigo enables effective collaborative research. You can easily share your findings, complete with your highlights and sticky notes, with friends and colleagues. A project team, a class, or a club can create a group on Diigo to pool relevant resources, findings and thoughts together.” https://www.diigo.com/about “A SIN is a social network where information consumption, research, and sharing is central, and where the connection between people and people, between people and information, and between information and information, are exploited and harnessed to improve knowledge sharing and content discovery, and to enable more meaningful social connections and intellectual exchanges.” – this quote especially makes me reflect on the work my staff have been doing over the last 18 months as part of the CLRP project. It seems to fit with the true essence of collaboration; that the sharing of ideas and development of these ideas into new understanding, can only be supported and enhanced through the use of an online platform such as Diigo. I love the idea of social bookmarking and having the flexibility of accessing my favourite URLs wherever I am. My great fear, as with many new platforms and innovative curriculum tools is that I won’t use it nearly as much as I would hope too. How can we use all things? How do we avoid using many of these brilliant platforms with our students just once and the never returning to them? I can see with Diigo that once embedded into my blog it can be a constant resource for myself and my students. Its other, self indulgent trap, is that one group can lead onto another and then another group and soon your find yourself four hours later still adding URLs to your Diigo site and the ironing never got finished!