Thursday, May 10, 2007

Web 2.0 in the Classroom

I just finished teaching a computer ethics course at Judson University--okay, it's still Judson College now, but they will be changing to University this Fall (http://www.judsoncollege.edu/). I used a web 2.0 tool called diigo (http://www.diigo.com/). Diigo is an acronym for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff".

It may be that you've heard of del.icio.us which is a very popular social bookmarking tool. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool plus annotation tool. It allows you to read an article, bookmark it, and within the article, make annotations like "highlighting" and "sticky note comments". This makes it an awesome research tool.

In the past I have had students bring articles to class that pertain to the assigned chapters, but this time I made this an entirely digital activity. The students were to find online articles, book mark, annotate, and share them with the group forum that I set up for them. We then, with the group forum on the projector screen, would have each student talk us through their article.

While this tool is still in "beta" the student assessment survey that was taken at the end of the last class seemed to indicate that this activity was well received.