Evergreen’s Academic Computing currently supports the use of Zotero for web-based bibliographic citation management. Although this tool’s focus is not social bookmarking, it does have group features like discussion forums and access to shared bookmarks and notes.
How we currently support Zotero
- installed Firefox extension in the Computer Center
- provide workshops to students
- looking in the future to running the stand-alone Zotero client app
What is Diigo?
It’s like Delicious…
- bookmarking tool – Diigo appears to be positioning themselves to pick-up Delicious users when Yahoo “sunsets” this service.
- Currently supports import of Delicious bookmarks
- similar to Delicious, Diigo uses a browser extension toolbar to create bookmarks and annotations. Minus the extension you can login and use the Diigo site to create bookmarks and browse sites via iFrames for group bookmarks and annotations
It’s like Zotero…
- can create private or public groups and share bookmarks and notes
- it does not appear to have citation management features (although community has requested)
Only Diigo…
- has an educators account that allows teachers to create student accounts and set usernames and passwords
- student accounts and activity is protected, ads are limited to educational related sponsors
- allows highlighting of website text
- creation of threaded discussion like notes (sticky notes) directly attached to websites
- profile picture attached to posts
- offline downloads of sites for reading later, iPhone/iPad app
Summary
If you want your students to manage bookmarks for later inclusion in a bibliography, Zotero is a good choice. If, however, you want students to collaboratively annotate, highlight and or discuss online the text of websites, Diigo offers a much better tool set.
If you choose to use Diigo:
- get an educators account
- make sure to get permission from all students to create accounts for them. Make sure they understand their data will be hosted outside of Evergreen’s network
- do not use their first and last name in the account creation process (Diigo is really good about emphasizing this point in the student account creation process)
- review the educator’s FAQ
- we currently do not support the Diigo browser extension in the computing labs, students will have to install the extension on their own computers, on computer systems in the Computer Center each time they log in or use the Diigo site.
- Contact me and I can show you how to set this up for your course or program