Chapter 6 Richardson

Of the tools discussed in Chapter 6 by Richardson, the one I am most excited about is Social Bookmarking. Last class period, I signed up for my first social bookmarking tool--Diigo! I was impressed with how easy it was to use and I like that I could highlight or annotate the pages I saved. Annotation is a reading strategy a lot of our teachers use--students are already familiar with the idea of "talking back to the text"--why shouldn't they do this with online text as well? I'd like to work with a few teachers to use Diigo in their research projects that we have team-taught this year. Richardson's example of the teacher who uses Diigo's sticky-note function to respond to student weblogs is also exciting. Both feedback from teachers and peers could be collected using this tool.

One of the best notes about Diigo is how webpages can be preserved. Preservation has been an issue we have studied in many of our classes so far. With print resources, chances are, they will always be able to be tracked down in one library or another. But digital research is the way of the world now--and what happens when pages are taken down? Are they lost forever? I like that with Diigo, one can save pages in an archive, even if they no longer exist on the web.

One shift that research seems to be making is the transition toward a more collaborative model. In my library skills class, students learn how to use online subscription databases and the free web, but I'm definitely going to add a lesson on the benefits of using Diigo Search. One popular research topic is "Cell Phone Use in Schools"--when I typed this in to the search bar, Diigo pulled up four extremely relevant hits. This number is manageable and it shows students what sites others have been looking at regarding this topic.