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in title, tags, annotations or url

Before class on Tuesday, I have never heard of the program Diigo.  When Professor Wolf mentioned that, it was a way to annotate online documents right on the web page.  He also explained how it is interactive, that you can read other annotations posted by others and others can read yours.  At first, I didn’t see myself ever using this after this class.  I find it easier to read documents once they are printed out rather than right off the screen.  I cannot concentrate when the documents are on the screen and I feel better writing notes in the margins with a pen and highlighting.   After using Diigo on the readings for Thursday, I realized that I might be able to use this tool in a classroom with students.  I would not use it for anything lower than the fourth grade, but it would be a great tool to integrate into lessons.  For instance, a teacher could set up a group in Diigo and have the students all join an account. Then for different lessons, such as a science lesson on the layers of the earth, the teacher could use an article or web page that reinforces the lesson.  The students would then go in and read the article and comment using Diigo.    I think students would benefit from this activity for several different reasons.  I think the fact that it is on the computer they would find it fun and different from reading out of a textbook and answer questions.  I also think that since it is interactive, the students can comment on one another’s thoughts taking the pressure off that comes with face-to-face conversation.  In addition, if this is done in the classroom using three or more computers, it is away for the children to interact but keep the noise level down while other students do independent work at their desks.  

If you’re one of the expanding list of genealogy bloggers, chances are good you frequently find things online you’d like to write about. In addition to copying the quote, you also need to grab the site’s name, article/page title and link. Diigo, my favorite online research tool, can help make this process a whole lot easier. Diigo’s “Blog This” function builds on its highlighting and annotation features to make it easy to capture information and incorporate it into a blog post. The feature works with WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, Moveable Type, Windows Live Spaces and Drupal blog platforms. Here’s how it works . . . Setup The first step is to set up your blog so Diigo can access it. Log into Diigo then click on My Tools. Now click on Blog This in the left column. When that page appears, click on the +Add a new blog link. Enter the address of your blog in the URL field, then click Next. Now enter the username and password you use to to access your blog and click Add New Blog. Your blog should now appear on your Blog This page. You’re ready to start blogging. Blog This As you browse the web, you come across a tidbit you’d like to write about. Highlight the text you’d like to include in your post, right-click and choose Diigo > Blog This from the popup menu.

In the example shown here (configured for a WordPress blog), you can see in the left column that this post is going to my Family Matters blog as a draft in the News category. What you actually see will depend on what blog platform you are using. I may post a “quick and dirty” item directly from the Diigo editor, but generally I will send the highlighted text to my blog as a post and finish it off there. Either way, Diigo has made it easy for me to include web content in my posts - saving both time and effort.

Enter Diigo. I’m surprised this excellent social bookmarking service doesn’t have a higher profile online. It’s fast, easy, and it saves a cache of every page by default. I really don’t see how del.icio.us can compete, considering that Diigo looks much nicer and still manages to respond more crisply. (Yes, there are other social bookmarking sites out there, and were I a true productivity blogger and not a dilettante, I’d give you a point-by-point feature comparison with a nifty chart. In this case, I’m going to fall back on “trust me.” Diigo’s the best I’ve tried, and I’ve tried a bunch.)

Use Diigo for static pages with useful content. Here are some suggested uses from my own Diigo love affair: Research. Why bother copying and pasting articles you’ll be using in your next paper or presentation when you can add them to a searchable database in one click? Publicity. If you have a blog, podcast, or other promotable work, you’ll want to clip all the reviews, blog mentions, etc. Diigo’s perfect for quickly and easily capturing those mentions for posterity and, since it’s shareable, you can show off your best clips in a snap. Want List. It’s not really a resolution, but I do plan to cut down on my expenditures in 2008, and one way that’s always worked well for me in the past is creating a “want list.” When I see a nifty notebook or gadget or safety razor I want to buy, I add it to the want list with the date. 30 days later, if it still sounds awesome, I’ll buy it. But often my enthusiasm for that nifty cable wrap I saw on Cool Tools has waned and I’ve saved twenty bucks. Lifehacks. Obviously. If you’re like me, you’re constantly gathering tips and advice on productivity and technology from around the Web. Save them here and go over them periodically to see which ones actually worked in practice and which were quickly forgotten. Recipes. Several recipe sites let you aggregate your favorites, but if you get your recipes from multiple sites, you can use Diigo to keep them all in the same place. Blogging. One of the big advantages of a social bookmarking service is the social part. Diigo makes it easy to share your links, post them to your blog, or even do an automatic daily post of links to your site.

Diigo Debuts WebSlides - The Ten-Minute Preso Fix Normally, I wouldn’t pop a vendor’s release in the Exclamation blog, but I really think that Diigo has come up with a pretty novel idea. Slideshows, when they’re good, tell a story. And that’s exactly what Exclamation is about - telling kick-ass stories. This morning, Diigo officially released WebSlides. They’re probably hanging out at Office 2.0 right now, basking in the glory of their slideyness. This release puts social tagging and bookmarking a little bit closer to the average joe, as it lets them enjoy the benefits of the medium without having to learn the guts of how it works. Here’s a good example of how WebSlides looks: a slideshow on genealogy 2.0. We’ve been using Diigo here at LaunchSquad for about five months, and while we normally use it to forward cool sites around the office (and share with clients), there are some pretty solid applications for marketing, PR, social media and communications here too. WebSlides allows the user to make a slideshow of anything they tagged in Diigo. So, for example, if you have about 10 minutes and a decent wireless connection, you can prepare a narrated clip portfolio to show some of your company’s work (e.g. great articles written about your company or your clients). As long as these sites are already bookmarked in Diigo, you can pop them into the drag-and-drop interface and create the show very quickly; a web-slides feature has always been an Achilles heel of PowerPoint. (Well, geez, one of many - who am I kidding, here?) WebSlides differs from, say, Slideshare, because (1) it’s not just for uploading pre-existing Pages or PowerPoint presentations into a slideshow. It’s meant for making web-clipping slideshows, quickly. Not to diss Slideshare too much; they’re good for what they are - a post-presentation YouTube - but you really can’t make anything that looks too polished due to their bric-a-brac UI. For the time being, I’d go easy on using sound and narration gratuitously on WebSlides, as it doesn’t seem to have quite caught up with the rest of the product, but Diigo is usually good about fixing all bugs in a few weeks. WebSlides is a practical innovation from a company that’s been percolating with good ideas for some time now.

Somehow, I find myself trusting Diigo more than Facebook, although you can connect to Facebook via Diigo. What's also present is the potential for "Diigo-spam." Ok, I've spammed everyone in my addressbook. I can't remember the last time I did it, but I hope that if you received an email via Diigo from me, you'll jump in and give this a try. If you don't want to, hit delete. Do I think Diigo is that powerful a tool? Well, yes. It offers something Delicious doesn't--groups, and a base of operations that interfaces with other tools. If I could share information using Diigo, ohmygosh, one ring to rule them all. One of the other aspects of Diigo I liked was that the Diigo crew is hopping to improve things. Importing bookmarks from Delicious API wasn't working well (i had to try 3-4 times), so they came up with an alternative way to accomplish the import. Dean Shareski complained about the interface, and they re-did the user interface. There's also talk of creating an education (student) friendly Diigo....

Easy group subscription - I wish there was a URL I could share with people. They click on it, and bam, if they have a Diigo account, they're subscribed. If they lack an account, it walks them through the process then makes sure to hook them up with the group. I just don't see how to do it easily now.

Everywhere I turn, people are joining Diigo, forsaking the simplicity of Delicious for the social nature of Diigo, which offers a variety of ways to connect with others--highlight text, then save it to your bookmarks, post to your blog, send it out as a tweet, and share it with a group of like-minded educators. The power of the network...comes alive in a way that removes the onus of commercialism so prevalent in Facebook.

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.