Connecting for CCK09

This morning I’m starting to stumble across unofficial groups of people set to participate in the course organizing online.

I joined the Diigo group “CCK0809” today.  I really think Diigo is one of the most underrated tools on the web for learning and writing.  If you’re not familiar with Diigo, it’s a social bookmarking tool that does many of the same things that more well known social bookmarking tools like digg and delicious.  What makes it special is that, in addition to social bookmarking, it allows you to “highlight” right on a webpage, and add comments wherever you want on the page that then appear as sticky notes to you when you return.  Your highlights and notes can also be shared with other diigo users who visit the same page.  (You can decide whether a particular bookmark, note, or highlight should be totally public, totally private, or available to specific diigo users you select.)  This feature is incredibly useful if you are teaching a class or working on a collaborative project, especially if you want the people with whom you’re sharing to key in on a specific passage or think about the information on the page in a particular context. The other nice feature of Diigo is that you can use the “share” feature to send e-mails to individuals or groups that automatically includes a link to the bookmarked page and embeds in the message all the passages on the page that you highlighted.  This is very handy when you are just trying to point out a few specific parts of a long report or complex page.

Unfortunately, the highlighting and annotation features only work with HTML pages, but not with PDF documents or iPaper, so some webpages can really only be bookmarked.  Overall, though, diigo provides a great set of tools that are easy to use, especially if you’re a Firefox user and install their toolbar.

This afternoon, I’ll check out delicious, Facebook, and Twine to see if any CCK09 related groups have formed on through those communities.