Diigo-ing: Building Collaborative Communities for Engaging with Informational Literacy

As the Common Core State Standards encourage teachers to capitalize on informational literacy skills across content areas, a common struggle many of us face is limited access to engaging informational texts. Drawing from motivational theories which emphasize the role of reader choice in selecting texts and the importance of engagement to sustained reading, one potential solution is to encourage students to draw from their own resources and interests in “building” a library of informational texts. An easy way to implement such an idea is utilizing a social bookmarking tool such as Diigo, where students can contribute sources, comments, and even collaboratively read texts while they engage in self-selected informational reading. Using the teacher-friendly educational version, I’ve used Diigo with three different age groups emphasizing three different dimensions of informational literacy skills (all while developing digital literacy competencies as well).
A few elements of informational literacy include:

• annotating text
• annotating bibliographies (and even saving sources to create bibliographies!)
• evaluating sources/arguments

A few elements of digital literacies include:

• bookmarking websites
• creating useful tags/tagging in general
• engaging in collaborative digital communities

1. Middle School: The Research Process
One of the largest struggles facing my middle school researchers was keeping track of their sources–no matter what type of graphic organizer I provided them with. First, Diigo solved this problem by making it easy for my students to save their sources to their personal accounts (which also appeared in our class group). Secondly, we began very *tentative* measures towards annotating sources, deciphering what is useful and essential in sources in order to make notes to ourselves that would be useful for later research. Using the comment feature on our bookmarks, students were able to engage in this process. Finally, we were able to expand our notions of research community beyond the limited and often individualized conception of research that takes place in K-12 education. By sharing sources and interest summaries/annotations with our group page, students were able to draw from and recommend sources to peers researching similar topics.

2. High School: Critical Analysis of Sources
High school students still often take authorship at authoritative face-value. So one way to develop a more critical mindset towards the research process was to break down the steps of critically analyzing sources into scaffolded chunks until students were able to not only identify the bias or weakness in arguments but to provide succinct rebuttals. We accomplished this over the course of 6 weeks prior to even beginning our research project, as students posted self-selected informational texts and analyzed the arguments/sources in different ways. Throughout the process, peer samples served as resources of (1) potentially interesting topics and (2) mentor texts to guide the analysis process. Ultimately, students were able to draw from this “library” of topics to select a final research topic, all the while developing a more critical approach to engaging with sources.
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3. College Level: Building a Library of Sources
This project was far less analytical, instead literally serving as a potential hub for students to draw from resources that would help to inform their teaching practices in the future. Students contributed sources that either addressed content area literacy or served as collections of informational texts as they collaboratively constructed exactly the type of informational text library that our classrooms are so often missing.