Digg

One of the things we do is look at various social bookmarking and web 2.0 sites that may have some potential for teaching and learning. Today it was the turn of Digg. http://digg.com.   This is one of the major social bookmarking sites, and you quite often see “Digg this” on web sites. The idea is that people submit sites they find interesting, and the most popular ones are revealed on the home page. But the real strength is that you can build a network of “friends” (a bit like Facebook) and you all share your favourite sites. You can also comment on stories, videos and podcasts.

There are some obvious applications for this in education. It would be easy to get a class to  work together to create a critically reviewed network of sites on a particular topic. Digg also offers the oppoprtunity to “bury” sites with broken links, inaccurate information and so forth.  That way the site is kept up to date with reliable information. The point is it’s all user generated – the wisdom of crowds I suppose. I haven’t done much more than join this morning, but I hope to be back with reviews later when I’ve had the chance to use it in anger!