Social Networking and Bookmarking Tools

This week for my Technology, Culture and Learning Class, we worked on social booking and social networks sites.  I was able to create an account for Diigo and Twitter.  I added friends, groups and interests to these sites.  I have never used either of the sites before and it was a little difficult to navigate.  I found myself going back and forth between the class website for instructions and the actually Diigo or Twitter page.  It took me a little longer than I expected to create my pages and get them working correctly.  Also, every time I tried adding my name and user ID to the class page I kept getting a “denied access” message which was a little frustrating. 

The Diigo website was very interesting. I have never heard of Diigo or social bookmarking before this assignment.  As I previously mentioned creating my page was a little stressful due to the fact that I had no idea such a site existed.  Once I was able to understand and navigate through the site it went a little smoother.  I really enjoyed working on Diigo.  I was able to add classmates to follow and also joined groups.  The most interesting part of this website was creating and saving bookmarks.  This is a great way to communicate information to students, co-workers, family and friends.   Also, you can meet other users who are interested in the same topics and bookmarks and create open discussions with them.  This will be a great resource to discuss and learn about current education trends and best practices in education and training.  I was also able to add the Diigo offline reader app to my iPhone and have already begun using it.

Some other social bookmarking site I looked into was Delicious.com and Digg.com.  Both of these sites were very informative and I could see using them as a well to get provide important or relevant information to students and co-workers.

The second part of this week’s assignments was social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Before this course I decided that I had no use for a twitter account.  I already had a Facebook account that I was barely utilizing and I figured I had no need for another social networking site!  Well, thanks to Technology, Culture and Learning 755 I have a twitter account and begin “tweeting”.  I will probably use my twitter account, much like I use my Facebook account, just to communicate with a group of friends and family.  Keep my groups updated and following them on their accounts.  This type of account would be prefect for a college advisor or teacher to communicate important information with to their students.  Also, they can create a group to discuss relevant topics just like we have on our message boards in D2L.