Note Taking Challenge: BR8

For this week’s note taking challenge, I decided to use Diigo. Prior to this course I had never heard of Diigo. I actually had to search for information about Diigo because I did not understand the point of the site when I first created my account. I watched their three introduction/getting started videos. The videos addressed research, sharing, and collaborating with Diigo. The videos helped me to gain a clearer sense of what the site provides. After viewing the videos, I realized that Diigo is a social bookmarking site. The site allows users to organize, highlight, archive, search, and annotate webpages and pdfs. The website reminds me of a combination of several different productivity tools. It is similar to Evernote, Zotero, Pocket, and Delicious. For the Note Taking challenge, I bookmarked the webpage for Brain Rule #8. I also used the highlighting and sticky note feature on the webpage itself. In addition, I created a note within Diigo with a summary quote from the Brain Rules text.

It was relatively easy to complete all these tasks. However, I had to use the Diigo bookmarklet feature in order to highlight and sticky note the webpage. I had to lookup how to do this on the website, it was presented as a popular feature, but not easy to find and use. Diigo seems more useful for online research, but I can see its usefulness for note taking. Traditionally notes could be easily organized and made searchable in Diigo due to the tagging and full text search features. This could be very useful for making connections between various readings or studying for comps.

Diigo does provide all of the things one would need to store, organize, and annotate webpages, pdfs, and text files. I do not think it restricts or prevents me from doing anything. I personally disliked having to create the boomkarklet because I already have a  lot of bookmarks. There is also a Diggo extension that can be installed, which provides more features, such as screenshots. The extension also has a quick note and read later faster feature. However, these are only available on Google Chrome.

I would choose Zotero or Evernote over this application because I feel that Zotero is easier to use and Evernote has a lot of features. However, I could see my students preferring Diigo because it has “cool” features. The sticky note feature is nice to have. I also like that the list of bookmarks can be played like an interactive slideshow. I am not sure what I would use this feature for, but it is nice to quickly view each of the bookmarks.

If I were to use this in a class, I would have the students use Diigo as a research log. The students could use the notes feature to keep track of and log their research process. They can also bookmark, archive, and annotate the webpages they find. This could be useful for teaching students about tagging and making connections between their sources, which is a significant problem in undergraduate research papers.

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