Group items tagged

Clearly one of the challenges academia faces is to figure out a productive use of networks in terms of research practices. Usually I write more about the teaching aspects of the university and clearly there are many ways universities will employ networks. But I want to think specifically about the use of the web for research with a few goals in mind: to enhance collaboration between academics to publish and share research to share knowledge with a broader audience (students, governments, industries, non-profits, the general public, and so on) One might say that these have been answered, but the real challenge is that as the web continues to evolve and now converge with other networks, the practices we have established need to change as well. That is, from the inception of the web, one could find the appearance of academic journals: genuine, rigorously reviewed, academic scholarship available freely online. There were (and are) listservs that might facilitate collaboration. Similarly individual faculty and faculty organizations built websites where they offered information, policy statements, and so on (NCTE or MLA for example in English Studies). But how are we moving forward?

Conventional academic discourse lies with journals and conferences. For all the advantages of these modes, neither offers an ongoing, dynamic interchange. Listservs offer that, but, in my experience anyway, they don't really create a productive, collaborative space. Sometimes there are debates on listservs; sometimes there is sharing of information (e.g. does anyone know a good article about x"?). But there isn't a sustained building of knowledge there. I suppose there could be, but there isn't, probably b/c we all go off to write our individually authored articles and conference presentations. In any case, the listserv is too large a community for collaborative work. Yes, tens of thousands contribute to Wikipedia, but they don't all work on the same article, right? So I don't know what the magic number is, but let's say I was looking for a dozen scholars in who were interested in the same things I'm interested in: mobile networks virtual worlds audio/video production public, collaborative learning It's unlikely that we would all work on the same research project at once, but there would be a handful of project undertaken by individuals or small groups. There would be a public face to the group and a private project management site, like Basecamp. The public face would offer a steady stream of information as we shared what we were doing, what was going on in our teaching, what we were reading and writing. We'd be assembling streams of information from our blogs, twitters, flickr, YouTube, and so on--wherever we were post information. The result is a collection of information that is hopefully useful groundwork for more formal investigation and also a mechanism for fruitful collaboration between our classes.

Meanwhile, in a more private space we might be orchestrating collaborative classroom projects and sharing research, drafts, and other media: constructing our scholarly work. When it's complete, we publish it in traditional venues and republish it on our public site as well.

WebSlides - Transforms Bookmarks Once Again

This innovation is a browser based player that displays live Web pages with integrated annotation, sticky notes and highlights in an interactive slideshow. With this cool tool users can record and narrate tracks as well as add background music to make compelling shows - and somewhat more. WebSlides is being presented at the Office 2.0 Conference as I write this, so we wanted you to have a look at this simple, innovative and useful tool as well.  

Web 2.0 has to a large extent been about new ways of organizing and manipulating data. This is particularly true of bookmarks and other links. Innovative developments like Second Brain, Particls and others have pushed the envelope in creating useful and fascinating ways for organizing all types of links and data. Well, testing this little tool makes me wonder why someone did not think of this before (I - know just comment and tell us about your service too). WebSlides is like StumbleUpon in motion actually. It does not yet have the "resident" features of SU, but WebSlide creations saved or submitted to other services will exhibit a similar feel. So just when we thought StumbleUpon and a host of others had done everything with pages - along comes WebSlides. Here is a short list of things users might do with this service. Create guided tours of websites Display a list of houses or other products to clients Bundle education resources or research data Make shows of favorite places when visiting or traveling Create briefings or tutorials and tours on virtually any subject Present a whole series of news stories on a topic to digg or del.icio.us and others for scrutiny Interactively submit "collections" of stories and data

For longer articles or for posts where I want to highlight a particular quote or passage, I also use Diigo, which I've written about before. I can use it to bookmark pages, but I'm mostly interested in my ability to use a virtual yellow highlighter directly online and to add digital yellow sticky notes, too. So when I go back to the page, it's like the page in a book with my highlights (other people may have highlights, too), my comments and so on. It's really very cool and helps me to pull my thoughts together.

DIIGO: At first I wasn't sure this was going to be cool, but then I changed my mind. Diigo is a way to do research online and create a virtual "web report" of content and links which you can use later to collect information and/or share with others. Imagine doing research on a topic like "HTML programming" and bookmarking each page of relevant information with highlighted portions that you can evaluate later. If you can imagine it, then Diigo is where you sould spend some time. I dig it, you might too.

I just stumbled upon diigo, which follows the footsteps of del.icio.us but takes it up a notch. All I was looking, was for a way to highlight content on the web. The web is an incredible source of information, and while doing research, I find myself going back to bookmarked pages to find code snippets or some other info. Besides being able to bookmark a page, I wanted to be able to permanently highlight something on the page. Diigo allows you to do this, and it is available with a Firefox plug-in (I believe they also have an IE plug-in as well). Here is an example of a site I was reading and wanted to highlight something:

Now, whenever I visit that page, the content I highlighted will always be there. But wait, there’s more. You can share add notes as well to your bookmarks, and you can share this information with ‘friends’ under your accounts or automatically post to groups you define. This is a great way to share information, you could have people in your enterprise subscribe to the groups you define and then automatically share everything in a collaborative matter. For instance, you could create a group called “Virtualization” and once you find an interesting article, comment what you need and push it to the subscribed users. This can only make the flow of collaborating information a lot smoother.

What it is:  Education Diigo offers k-12 and higher ed educators premium Diigo accounts!  The premium accounts provide the ability to create student accounts for whole classes, students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can easily share bookmarks, annotations, and group forums, privacy settings so that only classmates and teachers can communicate with students, and any advertisments on Education Diigo are education related.  If you aren’t familiar with Diigo, it is a social bookmarking website where students can collaborate on the web.  Diigo works in to a project based learning environment nicely and allows for exploratory learning and collaboration.  

Education Diigo is an outstanding place for students to solve problems together.  Provide students with a problem and send them on a web scavenger hunt to find the answer, students can post their findings and notes about their findings on Diigo.  Students can collaborate online to solve the problem.  Education Diigo is also a great place for “teachers to highlight critical information within text and images and write comments directly on the web pages, to collect and organize series of web pages and web sites into coherent and thematic sets, and to facilitate online conversations within the context of the materials themselves.”  This feature makes Education Diigo a great place to create webquest type lessons and virtual field trips around the web.    Diigo also allows teachers to collaborate and share resources among themselve. Education Diigo is a must for students who are learning to complete web-based research!

Diigo - a must-have for online research Posted by Prof Wesch under Web 2.0 , Tutorial  Students, Get Diigo now. This is the greatest thing that ever happened to on-line research. If you use Firefox, there is a Diigo extenstion that will create a toolbar in your browser. Diigo will revolutionize the way you do online research by allowing you to do the following: bookmark and tag any site with the touch of a button write your own comments on the site for later viewing highlight important passages (only you can see your highlights) post virtual sticky notes directly on the webpage that only you can see store all your highlights and stickynotes in one place for later review share your bookmarks with others (if you prefer) This is just the beginning. The tool is amazingly flexible and has the potential to do even more. If you do most of your research online, give it a try.

NeoArch July 25, 2006 Diigo Criticism Filed under: diigo — NeoArch @ 8:52 am Diigo Launches, Nobody Cares - Mashable* Diigo is being criticized over on Mashable for being just one more social bookmarking site. That’s all well and good. I guess when you create a new social tool you should expect that–unless, of course, you create a good one. And that, my friends, is what Diigo is. So in answer to the who cares question, I offer the following: Who cares? Bloggers. Trust me. I am one. On several blogs. A large part of blogging is just countering other bloggers. It’s sorta like what I am doing now. Who am I kidding? It is what I am doing now. The advantage to bloggers is twofold. First, Diigo allows you to store your notes right on the page of the blog with which you disagree. Second, Diigo has blog functionality that lets you blog right from Diigo. Which is what I am doing now. Tagging and blogging can occur seamlessly. And it allows you to have multiple blogs. Try doing that with the Performancing plugin (which I love.) Who cares? Researchers. They have wanted a tool like this for years. I don’t know how many times I have wanted to put marginalia on a blog like I do my books. Now I can. Others can as well. I am a librarian in an academic institution. Trust me. Researchers will use this. Who cares? Anyone who uses the web. This is the type of tool that has a wide appeal, especially for those who do not already use a social bookmarking service. This one IS better than others. This one DOES offer something others don’t. This one DOESN’T just clip text. This one puts your notes right where you want them. Hey, I realize there is some truth to the Web 2.x hype. Who wants another social site that has a name that sounds like a Star Wars character. Put if you’re going to fault Diigo for anything, fault it for having a stupid name. Don’t fault it for competing in crowded space. It fills a need for many people, just like all the mom and pop Linux distros out there do. It is marketable, as is evidenced by the fact that over 10,000 people signed up for the Diigo Beta test.

You should know about Diigo! Filed under: Uncategorized, Technology, folksonomy, diigo — NeoArch @ 9:09 am To those of you who read this blog on a regular basis, I want to apologize for posting infrequently lately. I have had a couple other projects that I have been working on, plus my Church had vacation Bible school last week. You don’t get much done during VBS week. I just wanted to take the time to inform you about a new social bookmarking service. For those of you who already have one, you’re probably groaning, “Not another one!” I know. I know. I have been using Del.icio.us for…well…forever. I can’t remember life before Del.icio.us. In fact, I have no intentions on ceasing from using Del.icio.us. (With Diigo and its toolbar, I don’t have to, but more on that in another post.) For those of you who don’t have a social bookmarking service…well…you need one. Social bookmarking is a way to keep track of all of the websites that you visit. It allows you to describe the page using several one word “tags.” For example, if you visited the page for “Talladega Nights,” you might tag it as “movie,” “Will_Ferrell,” “stupid,” and “NASCAR.” This may seem like a useless service until you cannot find that page with the thing that you needed for your job and now you’re gonna get fired cause you can’t produce what you said you could. Or perhaps you can’t find that online add for that ring for your wife that you saw that would save you $1000 so now you can’t get a new johnboat because you don’t have the extra $$$$ you would have saved. Trust me. You need one. There are several out there. Diigo is different, though. The service is only in beta testing at this point, so you have to actually request an invitation to participate. Diigo not only lets you save a bookmark to the page, but it also allows you to highlight content. It lets you add virtual sticky notes to the page. This really is the ideal tool for research and blogs. You can access your thoughts about a certain web page from anywhere in the world, right on the web page. How many times have you wished that blogs and webpages worked like books. You wish that you could add marginalia. You wish that the marginalia could be either public or private. It’s all possible with Diigo.

Don’t just take my word for it. Go try out Diigo’s playground for yourself. If you don’t think the service is the coolest thing since Cocoa Pebbles (it’s like cereal, only chocolaty), then walk away from your keyboard, go get in your 1973 Ford Maverick, throw in your favorite Captain and Tenille 8-track, and …well… you get the picture. I have just started using Diigo in the past few days, so I will have more to say about it later. However, I do think that this is one of the best social bookmarking sites that I have used. Long live Diigo!

Diigo just captured me. Not your ordinary time- and resource-sucking Firefox extension!

Something I didn't know I needed. Another virtual plaything. Honestly, though, this one looks promising. It's not just another time- and resource-sucking Firefox extension! Diigo.com integrates all those housekeeping tasks so critical to organizing one's online research. Diigo's "Blog This" tool is faster and easier to access than TypePad QuickPost or Blogger's BlogThis! And Diigo knocks del.ico.us right off my toolbar.

let me show you something I really like and am recommending that research teams use - Diigo.

This FREE product has enough features that I would willingly pay for it and from me, that is a high compliment. Here are a few highlights from the VERY LONG list of features they offer. (Man, these guy are good!)

GREAT ONLINE OFFERINGS

Diigo Okay, Diigo is really cool.  Especially in a job like mine where I do a lot of research.  Diigo is a social annotation site so if you like surfing the net and want to leave notes on your favourite websites, Diigo is the program to do it.  Registration is free and there is no download required for basic Diigo.  It allows you to leave virtual "sticky notes" on the websites you visit.  The really cool part?  You can share your "online" notes with people of your choosing. 

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