I’m just getting used to a new elearning tool at the moment - well, new to me anyway - called Diigo. It bills itself as a web highlighter, a new way to create collaborative link resources much like the older and more famous Delicious. Diigo goes a little further though in that it allows you to archive pages so that you have a constant snapshot of the resource at that particular moment in time. It also allows you to highlight web pages and add sticky notes to it, although this requires a toolbar to be installed in your browser to activate.

An interesting way in which we are using it though is to create groups for student work. I’m currently participating in an online learning student seminar in which we’ve been split into collaboration grouping before being allocated a number of pre-set resources. Our task is to add to these resources, discuss existing ones and generally explore the topic area using the Research and sharing functions that Diigo offers us.

As always, new elearning tools like this offer a whole host of features which can either be very useful or turn out to be a bit of a white elephant - it all depends on how they’re used and whether the learning process is put at the heart of the task’s design rather than the technology. The activity I’ve mentioned above in Diigo is looking pretty promising so far - very well designed indeed - and I’ll update here to let you all know how it turns out. So far I’m digging Diigo, but will it follow through?