Why Go Diigo?

This week I was asked to explore social bookmarking websites such as Diigo, which was a totally unfamiliar concept to me. I have never even used Pinterest, really. Sure, I have heard the term "social bookmarking," but I was thinking about something totally different than what I found the reality to be.

Oh. Wait. I was thinking of social networking. Never mind. I never heard about social bookmarking before last week.

Anyway, I tried Diigo, which is a great concept but didn't really work for me. If you sign up, you are technically supposed to be able to bookmark, highlight, and essentially interact with webpages for better retention and organization. The problem? I'm lazy and like Internet Explorer. Plus, I'm having computer issues, so I really have no motivation to get Google Chrome, which is basically required in order to use Diigo to its full capacity. What that means is that I was only able to explore others' bookmarks and webpages and see how it is kind of supposed to work.

So, my problems aside, how might this be useful in a school library setting? Well, for starters, it could be a great way to show students how to make notes. During a class, the teacher could demonstrate how to pull out the major ideas and categorize them. This could be especially useful when working on a project which requires citations and sources and such. I am still passionate about using hard copies, but even I will grant that printing out every web page is a bit excessive. Usually I just try to cite it so well that I can find it again with no problem (isn't that the point of citing anyway?), but that can get a bit tedious sometimes. If teaching a class of even twenty students, Diigo could be a dream come true if every student were required to find and cite and incorporate three sources of at least five pages each. (20 x 3 x 5 = 300 pages!!!)

Diigo is also designed to help its users to avoid the dreaded digital trap--that of reduced retention. It addresses this problem by inviting users to directly interact with the material by highlighting, underlining, annotating, bookmarking, tagging, and organizing what they find and read.

We must be careful not to see Diigo as a panacea for digital distraction, though. The problem with the Internet is that it is so easy to instantaneously access information and multitask. I can be on Facebook chatting with a friend while searching for and reading three articles and also thinking about the final assignment due on Friday. How much might Diigo help me in this situation? Not much. I am actively fragmenting my brain's functioning, so no matter how organized Diigo might be, I have to actually decide to go into something in-depth. And that is what we need to teach our students above all.

Thus, I present the radical idea that we should never start with digital information-seeking technologies before we show our students how to do the same thing with print. Otherwise, they will, like us, be entranced by the glitter of the Internet's offerings and will have more difficulty focusing on a single task for a prolonged length of time and looking at something in-depth than they would if they started with delving into information with print materials that they could interact with personally.