Some of you may be aware of the conversation that I had with a blogger on the issue of Barack Obama’s character. If you are interested in the conversation you can follow this link. This post is not intended to rehash that conversation - so much as it is an explanation of the tools I used to deepen and expand the conversation.
The primary tool I used was Diigo.com. Diigo is a social networking, annotation
, bookmarking, sticky noting, and presentation tool. The basic idea was for the other blogger and me was to post on each others blog responses to each other position. That never really happen for my satisfaction, but I was very pleased with what Diigo showed me and its capability as conversation structure.
After getting use to the application by viewing several of the tutorials, I settled on a strategy for organizing the conversation. The idea was to conduct the conversation on a progressively deepening and expanding basis. The initial level was to simply follow each posting by the two bloggers. For this level no contact with Diigo was necessary. Thereafter for those that more and deeper engagement each post was bookmarked, organized on a group page by date and site location so that each group member could use and analyze the content. I made it a common practice of visiting my opponent’s site to highlight those statements that I disagreed with – in some cases I would add a sticky note to explain or comment further for the members of the Diigo (Reputation) group. The aim was to open the conversation for a wider and deeper dialogue. There was also a facility within Group Page for forum, where other questions and issues could be raised.
The features of Diigo where available to all the members of the conversation to make their voices heard: highlighting, sticky notes, annotating, and bookmarking.
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