Steve Kinney

This post is a follow-up to a post I wrote last week about using Web 2.0 strategies to encourage collaborative student learning. Web 2.0 is all about sharing and collaboration and with any luck, so is your classroom. The trick is finding new and innovative ways for Web 2.0 and your classroom to get along.

In the article, I talked about using wikis as a tool to empower students to collaborate on outlines and other documents. This time, let’s take a different approach: taking the general idea of Digg applying it in the classroom. If you’ve never been to Digg, I highly recommend that you stop on over (after you finish reading this post, of course). Digg is like a news website – albeit a bit more irreverent – with one major difference: There are no moderators or editors. Interesting stories are selected by the Digg community and appear on the front page of Digg. When a user comes across a story on Digg, they can choose to digg it. As a article earn more diggs, it ascends in the rankings until it finally reaches the front page.

Incredibly, this user interaction is what makes Digg so addictive for its users. Peers tend to pick stories that the mainstream press, but submitters to Digg also scour the internet looking for the most interesting content in order to increase their chances of being dugg. Allow me to rephrase, users – without any compensation whatsoever – are investing large amounts of time and effort seeking out content. Doesn’t this sound like something you should have in your classroom (hint: yes)?

There are a few caveats of course – you don’t want just any content; you want relevant content. Some teachers may scoff at the arduous task of training their students to use the internet responsibly. I argue that such skills are essential in the Internet Age (or the Information Age or the Ingenuity Age) and that it’s unfair to pass this responsibility off to someone else (or likely no one else). As teachers, we’ve accomplished much more difficult tasks in the past.

There are a few ways you can use a Digg model in your classroom. First, you can allow students to writing prompts and topic ideas. The class decide which subjects are the most interesting – this sure beats you giving yourself a headache on Sunday night trying to think of something. Students could share and comment on eachother’s drafts during writing process, eliciting instant feedback from their peers. In math and science, students could submit proposed answers and digg solutions that seem correct or comment on a peers approach.

All of these techniques remove you as the sole source of knowledge. They encourage students to collaborate, share, discuss, and critically think about ideas. This, in turn, increases their investment in whatever you’re teaching and makes the lesson more sticky. On top of that, you’re reinforcing accountable talk and the social skills necessary to succeed in today’s collaboration based workforce.

So, how do you incorporate your own home-grown version of Digg? Pligg is a free alternative (clever name, I know). It does take a hosting of some sort and a little bit of customization to get it up and running. I believe that it is well worth the investment. Someone should write a tutorial on how to implement Pligg (instead of just musing on its potential uses). My web host, Dreamhost, allows for one-click installation of Pligg – very convenient. Technology coordinators, check out Pligg at your earliest convenience.

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