Diigo Community

With the use of a tool such as webslides, students could then view the web site with the article or link to the primary source of the research. The students could view the websites with annotations by the teachers to support the students’ current level of understanding of the material or add additional information or questions to enhance the instruction. Students could then work in their groups to discuss their findings to their peers. This would allow students to come to their own conclusions from the information that they are presented. The assessment could be the presentation of their findings and conclusions via a posting to the class website or some other tool that would allow them to present what new ideas they synthesized and not a high tech presentation with little to no substance. Students would work in the same manner that other scientists around the world are by looking at the new data from research. The article was posted on the 20th of this month, two days ago, and students could be researching about the discovery tomorrow the 23rd. This changing of ideas also illustrates to students the way in which scientific knowledge changes and gets refined in light of new information from researchers. So could this lesson be taught without computer technology? Absolutely but technology allows the instruction to be much more fluid and connected. The teacher could run off all the articles, write on them and make copies for the class, but the exchange of information would likely not be as fluid.

WebSlides - Turning bookmarks and feeds into interactive slideshows… — A new Diigo service– with del.icio.us posting and some interesting annotation possibilities I keep thinking I should switch to Diigo as main posting point for sharing links

Diigo To Launch Webslides for RSS Feeds and Bookmarks at TechCrunch40 Research toolbox, diigo is going to introduce Webslides for RSS Feeds and Bookmarks at TechCrunch40 next week in San Francisco. The new Webslides widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format – complete with the full content, pages, links, comments, and ads. It can be sent to friends and colleagues and also placed on websites, blogs and in social networks. Each slide that is displayed actually registers as a page view for the content owner. Webslides also adds a new layer to the web by allowing any Diigo user to annotate each page on the fly with sticky notes to share thoughts or to highlight important sections. Viewers can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders. To create WebSlides, users simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks and add background music or voice narration. By clicking “Play,” the list transforms into a slideshow, bringing Web pages and user comments to life. For more on the subject, see TechCrunch.

Since most of my presentations are largely guided tours of pertinent Web services, this baby will save me a ton of time. Combine site syndication and social bookmarking with presentations and you get WebSlides, a service from social bookmarking service Diigo that turns RSS feeds and bookmark lists into annotated browser slideshows.

Webslides from Diigo I got an email from Diigo to check out their newest coolest web 2.0 innovation. They call it webslides and it is basically an animation that presents your favorite bookmarks. Just select a bunch of bookmarks, add some voice or sound if you want to, and that's it. Now people can see the things you like.When I was visiting the webslides site, I got a 'knowledge accident' and stumbled upon one on e-learning bookmarks "Transforming education through technology"

We received a nice exclusive from Diigo the social bookmarking beta about their latest release WebSlides. 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......

WebSlides - Transforms Bookmarks Once Again  Annotated New feature from Diigo (currently in private beta testing): create a slideshow of links with highlighting and sticky notes. You can record audio or add music to accompany it. I could see this having potential for basic tutorials or demos; you could do this instead of using screencast or recording software.

Monitoring my feeds, I’ve noticed there has been quite a bit of buzz surrounding a service called WebSlides. WebSlides is brought to you by the same folks that are behind Diigo, one of many social bookmarking services that are on the net. WebSlides allows users to take their bookmarks and turn them into a slide show.

The ideas and the possibilities, do seem endless. The service is currently in an invite-only stage of life however, I have signed up and if they provide me with an invitation, I’ll be sure to provide you with an in depth review.

I’ve been using Diigo for quite some time now to annotate, bookmark and share webpages. Now, they are offering a new functionality with the potential to become an even more effective tool to share knowledge in a great format as the video explains. Imagine collecting all your different web pages to research a vacation or group trip, annotate them, add voice commentary and then share them with friends or participants. Also, a travel agent could put together a collection of information and send it on in an attractive form to a client.

DEMOfall: The wisdom of many, many individuals

The center of influence and knowledge gathering, organization, and sharing is shifting from a centralized authority to the many individuals at the edge of the network. In this session, the following companies showed their solutions for these critical knowledge work tasks: Diigo, Inc.: We spoke with Diigo last week while they were preparing for DEMOfall. Diigo combines web highlighting, note-taking, organization and sharing in a very nice package. Enabled by adding a bookmarklet to your browser (all major flavors are supported), Diigo is adding the ability to collect your web clippings into an easily shared WebSlide presentation. There is a Groups feature that allows you to predefine a distribution list for sharing information and the interface is nicely AJAXed to provide drag-and-drop organization of content. Diigo also provides a social network dimension that allows you to search across the public collections shared by other Diigo users to find people with similar interests. You can search by tags or profiles and extend your network to include others who have displayed a similar are of interest to your own. Inviting friends you already have is all well and good but Diigo provides a way to discover new connections in the web clipping sphere.

The twice-yearly DEMO conferences, now in their 17th year, are known for seeking out and showcasing important new technologies that usher in new methods of computing. [DEMO is produced by Network World Conferences, a unit of tech publishing giant IDG.]

DEMOfall '07 is taking place September 24-26 at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina. It will introduce 69 carefully vetted products and services (see below) to "an audience of investors, business development executives, media, pundits, and fellow entrepreneurs."  I would expect attendance in the neighborhood of 700, based on past experience. Presenters include both early-stage and established companies.

Karen has asked me to provide you all with more info on working with Diigo so that those of you who are a bit unsure about what you can do with it can get started. Below I’ve included some of its key features, but I strongly encourage you to visit their help menu, where you can access neat little flash tutorials on how to get started that are far better than anything I can whip up here. Some Diigo Features: Tagging: An easy, user-generated way to categorize and organize your bookmarks Annotation: write sticky notes that can be made public so you can interact and collaborate with others who are reading the same pages. Highlighting: Easy to highlight parts of pages, extract them, and collect them (great for research!) Groups: you can create public and private groups—a great way to organize group projects and add a level of privacy to Diigo that you may feel more comfortable with than making everything public. Privacy: Options for privacy are available on just about all Diigo features Search: You can search not just by tag name, but also titles, notes, highlights, and full text. Blogging Integration: “Blog This” feature allows you to move easily between browsing and blogging. Populate your blog post instantaneously with the highlighted texts you selected while reading a web page - a big time saver. Archiving: Allows you to save EXACT copies of bookmarked pages, which protects you from losing cool stuff that may disappear over time.   Photos: You can collect your favorite photos into albums Subscribe/Post Lists: Bookmark lists can be subscribed on the website and through RSS Community: find new content from specific users or based on tags, hot lists

Here’s how to set up Related Articles links using Diigo. First, you will need to use a blogging platform that allows you to include RSS feeds within your posts. I use WordPress - the installed version, not the hosted one - and a plugin called inlineRSS.

Each entry includes a friendly name (which you’ll use later in your blog post), a comma, the URL of the feed that you copied from Diigo, another comma and the number of minutes between refreshes. I’ve got mine set to check for new additions to the list every 60 minutes. Now, go to your blog post and enter the following code at the point where you want the feed list to be displayed: That’s it!

The Good: The “About This Page” info– if it works correctly (it’s a beta, I totally understand when things don’t work quite as expected…..especially when aggregating information from multiple APIs) the About This Page is a useful, central repository of data on a selected page. This feature could be incredibly useful to companies that want to see what people are saying about them, blogs that want to know what their readers think of their stories, and anyone curious about how their information is being perceived by readers. Like the other social annotation services, the “Blog this” option is excellent, as it immediately does a cut and paste + login + compose + automatic reference citation. The interface is also very straight-forward and easy to use. When you log in at diigo, there are no points of confusion, and you can easily access your bookmarks and annotated content wherever you are. I could have really used something like this in college.

The Bad: A few technical glitches, but that’s expected at this early stage in the game. The only other problem I see with diigo is that they are in an incredibly crowded space, but I like their angle.

Conclusion: Like most of these services, it would be unfair to spend an afternoon trying to scratch the surface and give a detailed review of the features. Now that I’ve got the Firefox plugin installed, I’ll continue giving diigo a shot. To me, it would be interesting to see a side-by-side feature comparison between the different social bookmarking and annotation services out there. But that’s for another day, as this is Sunday, the Patriots are playing now, and the Sox have game seven tonight. Priorities, my friends, priorities.

Diigo: Group Exploration of the Web

Like Del.icio.us, Diigo lets you bookmark and tag pages and store those bookmarks on the Web. And as with Ma.gnolia, you can set up groups of like-minded Web wanderers who share bookmarks. But Diigo, which is free, adds some nifty new features, including the ability to add sticky notes to a page, highlight passages of text, or blog your clippings and notes with just a couple of clicks.

Beta Watch

Recommended Tool for Feature-Hungry Technophiles: Diigo Diigo has everything I’ve been looking for in a great social bookmarking/collaborative research tool—except ease of use. The tagging system is still buggy (renaming a tag or deleting it can lead to unexpected results), and the interface has some usability issues that I’ve already discussed with one of Diigo’s co-founders. For instance, tag clouds only display the first 18 characters or so of each tag, preferences on how to view your tags revert to default settings every time the page refreshes, etc. Unfortunately, Diigo is still too frustrating to use for me to recommend it to non-tech-savvy educators, but I hope its shortcomings will be resolved soon. If that happens, I’ll become a major Diigo evangelist. If not, I might have to embrace a more bare-bones bookmarking tool like Del.icio.us and search for a separate tool that just handles collaborative research well. Google Notebook is next on my list of tools to check out for that.

Diigo. Takes social bookmarking / social annotation to a whole new level. It’s been written up in Techcrunch and CNet. No point in repeating the good news. How helpful is it to bookmark a Web site if you need only one sentence from that 3,000-word article? Diigo is a free bookmarking service that lets you do what we wish Yahoo’s Del.icio.us would: highlight text and comment on Web pages. Diigo caches each site so that you can search within text, not just the topic tags. And you won’t have to leave the Del.icio.us community, since Diigo lets you save bookmarks simultaneously in both places. CNet One thing about Diigo. One gesture to Diigo can simultaneously update all your other bookmarking sites. That may create a lot of duplication, or it may create the opportunity to connect with others across a world of tagging that remains fragmented. I shall continue experimenting with it.

I wrote a “Guide to Quality Weblogs” for students to use as a rubric to critique each others’ blogs. It addresed every trait I could think of that goes into a quality blog, from theme design to post design, from content on the levels of the whole blog to content of individual posts, from connectivism via links to conversationalism via invitational conclusions in posts, prompt responses to comments, and more. I assigned each student to critique three other students’ blogs using this rubric, and leave their critiques not in the comments - who wants a comment for all to see that says “Your theme is boring and so are your ideas”? - but as Diigo annotations that only members of our class Diigo group can see. Again, “Digital Natives” my patootie: many students left good comments that rightly belonged in the “comments” section as Diigo stickynotes, again showing they have no idea of the very basics of this world. But they did it. We’ll keep returning to these criteria over the coming seven months.