I had only heard about curation tools with in the last year. I thought it might be good way to collect information at articles I was interested in instead of collecting a bunch of bookmarks.  So I choose to try a curation tool.  Because I wanted to categorize my information I choose Diigo  

Below are the links to my research topic on eLearning.

That said I am not sure that curation tools are worth the effort. Diigo says you can learn it in 5 mins.  Hah! I am a well-educated person and I found it a confusing and time consuming to learn.  Our faculty are pressed for time. I am not convinced these tools will help them manage the search for content.

The annotation itself does not seem to match what most annotated bibliographies contain.  The annotation reference from North Hampton Community College Learning Center, describes an annotated bibliography as, “is a list of sources (books, journals, periodicals, and websites) used in researching a topic. “ Also “…an annotation is a brief (usually a short paragraph) summary and/or evaluation of a source.” You can do this in Diigo as far as I can tell, however, a product such as EndNote would serve faculty and students much better. EndNote is a supported product for us as well. You can import references into EndNote as well as enter them manually.  There is also a web based and mobile app for the program. To be fair I do need to explore the Diigo mobile apps too.

Granted EndNote at this time does not work as a social media curation tool, but I find it more feature rich as well as having all the fields you need to have for a traditional annotated bibliography.  Plus it to can take time to learn, however, the output is better formatted. EndNote basically prepares a bibliography publish ready. Picking a tool to use may heavily dependent on your objectives for a classroom or research. To be far I do need to explore the Diigo mobile apps too.

Poking around more I finally found a couple of other ways that Diigo can work with blogs. However, one is to generate a DiigoReport that you can only print. The other is Publish to a blog but unless you use WordPress or Blogger it is difficult to use.  I tried adding my blog but could not. There online help is lacking! I purchased the basic subscription to

This particular tool I doubt I would use in teaching unless what I was going to have students do is very basic.  Perhaps I need more time with it, but I find Diigo dissatisfying at the least. i may have choose the wrong product as well.

These tools could most definitely improve collaboration and engagement. In the classroom.  An idea for use of such tools could be asking students to create a list of references, let say on  a literature topic that students can share. In this fashion they would be contributing to course content. Another idea could be to have students collect annotated references and comment  the pros vs cons on the references of their peers in a discussion topic.  This would help the student to engage each other an give encouragement or constructive criticism on the material.

#OLCsmed