Creating a Community of Inquiry Through Social Bookmarking

SUNY Empire State College's online RN to BS in nursing program started in the fall of 2008 through the Center for Distance Learning (CDL). The program offers innovative course design, and flexible learning opportunities that support individual student choices for lifelong learning. As part of a 400 level nursing research course, students were directed to use a social bookmarking tool called Diigo. The purpose of this activity is for students to learn how to conduct research using online tools, create an online repository of their resources, and post references from their research to share with their classmates. Students were provided detailed tutorials on creating an account in Diigo. Tutorials were also provided on showing students how to use the various Diigo tools. The directions for this assignment were to find, read and bookmark 15 peer reviewed articles over a 3 module period (6 weeks), cite in Diigo using APA style, annotate why they chose this article and how it fits into the literature on their topic of choice, and then comment on their peer's articles and annotations. During this assignment, a college librarian was active in guiding students and answering questions along with the course instructor, who gave feedback as to the quality of the sited articles. Feedback was collected from the students through an online survey at the end of the course. Several important lessons were learned through conducting this activity such as the importance for students to understand the long term benefit of learning how to conduct online research and the need to build private lists before sharing with the group. In addition, students found the supporting tutorials helpful as they provided direction and helped them to successfully complete the assignment. Participants attending this conference will be able to apply this free technological tool in their courses. Its private or individual use can be beneficial to instructors that incorporate research projects and that address APA, annotative bibliographies, online research and social networking.