cAsTa Ways: An Interview with Maggie Tsai of Diigo
Posted By Barbara Lindsey on November 16, 2008
In today’s episode, we had the chance to speak with Maggie Tsai, one of the co-founders of Diigo, a web-based research and knowledge-sharing environment. You could say Diigo combines all the best features of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and social networking sites like Facebook, which we discussed in a previous post. But spend just fifteen minutes exploring the video tutorials, how-to guides and user-generated content over at the Diigo Help Center and you’ll quickly realize that this is truly a unique and transformative tool. Diigo has the potential to change the ways in which we mentor all our students, but in particular, our graduate students and pre-service teachers, in a process that John Dewey calls ‘productive inquiry’, and what John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler describe as the key component to social learning:
“In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field. But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in learning to be even as they are mastering the content of a field.”
If you’re new to the concept of social bookmarking check out The Common Craft Show video in which they use del.icio.us as their example.
Then watch the four minute overview of some of the basic functions of Diigo to see just how Diigo expands on the concept of social bookmarking.
If you need any further convincing after listening to our conversation with Maggie, check out the following links and be sure to join our worldatways diigo group, where we can all share our annotated finds, ask questions and initiate discussions on topics of interest to you:
- Diigo: The End of Bookmarks?
- Three Uses of Diigo in the History and Language Arts Classroom
- 7 Reasons Diigo Tastes Better Than Delicious
- Maggie Tsai’s list of examples of educational applications of Diigo
In the course of our conversation with Maggie I discovered I was making use of just a small set of the many features in Diigo. We think Diigo is such a rich and innovative tool that we plan to devote several future blog posts to Diigo features that we think will really change the way we and our students can learn from and with each other in this globally interconnected world we live in. Do let us know which aspects of Diigo you’d like us to cover first and if you’ve used Diigo with your students and colleagues, we’d love to have you share your experiences here!
The wATw Podcast: An Interview with Maggie Tsai of Diigo [68:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (500)Music for our podcasts is courtesy of George Wood and is called Travelogue. You can find more of George Wood’s music at podsafeaudio.com
About the author
Barbara Lindsey
Barbara Lindsey currently serves as director of the Multimedia Language Center at the University of Connecticut. She has given numerous presentations and workshops on Internet-based language instruction at the state and national level. Barbara has twelve years experience teaching German language at the university level, and for the private business sector as well as after school enrichment programs. She has served as project director on three federally funded grants and is a past president of the Connecticut Council of Language Teachers (2004-2006).Comments
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[...] To not feel like a virtual wall flower, I invite you to connect with Barbara and me on Twitter and Diigo. You can find links to our profiles
[...] DiigoEvery educator needs professional development and this year Diigo has become my main, always-available, personalized learning network resource. Diigo has allowed me to not only save and annotate my own discoveries, but to see what other like-minded intellectuals have discovered, too. Barbara and I inteviewed Maggie Tsai of Diigo earlier in the year. If you haven’t already list… [...]
[...] Barbara and I already talked about Diigo extensively in a previous post and have even interviewed Ma… Diigo is a social bookmarking and annotation tool that has quite an active community. In fact, I would say that professionally, Diigo is my most useful social network. I’ve found countless pertinent websites by using Diigo’s toolbar effectively. In fact, if you install the Diigo toolbar and sign up for an account, you’ll notice that some have added sticky notes and comments to our blog posting on Diigo itself. Another tool in Diigo’s educational war chest is something called webslides. First, you can create a “list” of bookmarks. Then you can choose to view it as a webslide; in essence turning your list into a slide presentation. For example, here is a webslide I created to introduce students to Bullfighting. I have experienced one issue with the webslide function that I wanted to share with you: by clicking through the presentation, you’ll notice that some sites have “timed out”. Too, videos on YouTube tend to not be playable through the webslide. We invite you to listen to our previous interview with Maggie Tsai to learn more about Diigo. [...]