Group items tagged

Although it pains me to say it, I think there is something better than Delicious out there. I first came across Diigo in the summer and have been playing with it on and off ever since.  Social bookmarking has been an absolute godsend to education and Delicious was at the forefront of that - but, in my view, it’s been surpassed. I had high hopes of the latest version when it was released at the end of July, but, to be honest, they just focused on the instructional design and look-and-feel rather than functionality.  You still can’t create groups or lists, or send messages to the people in your network, and you can’t annotate either.  All of which can be accomplished in Diigo and more

Diigo groups are ideal for team research If you have any need for team-based research, Diigo groups are ideal for you. A Diigo group can be public, private or semi-private. Pool and organize resources using group bookmarks When a member of a Diigo group comes across a web page, he can highlight, tag, and share it to the group. In this way, group bookmarks become a repository of collective research. Group members can also vote up bookmarks so important information stays on the top. Group sticky notes are great for discussion When adding sticky notes, you can make them private, public, or viewable only by members of a certain group. With group sticky notes, group members can interact and discuss important points right on the web page, preserving the original context. Group tag dictionary to enforce tagging consistency The group administrator can define a set of recommended tags for the group to help enforce tagging consistency. Diigo has recently launched an education version, where you can create class accounts and add privacy settings, so I recommend you have a look at this. Oh, and for those of you who can’t quite leave Delicious behind just yet, you can synch the two so that whatever you save in Diigo gets automatically put into your Delicious account as well.

if you encourage discussion in class, you have to be prepared for your students to arrive at conclusions that are unpalatable to you.

When I started, largely out of exasperation, to investigate the educational research literature for myself, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was some genuinely useful and scholarly work out there, which recognised the demands of different subjects and even admitted that university lecturers aren't all workshy and stupid... It's a shame that this better stuff doesn't seem to have fed through into the generic courses that most institutions offer. My personal advice to anyone starting out as a university teacher: find a few colleagues who take their teaching seriously (there are almost certain to be some in the department) and ask them for advice; sit in on their classes if possible; remember you'll never teach perfectly but you can always teach better; and close your ears to well-meaning interference from anybody who's never actually spent time at the chalkface!

Magueijo's could acknowledge that some people teaching these courses are genuinely concerned about improving teaching, and they need academics' help in designing better courses that do so. Sotto's side should acknowldge that however much they talk about how important teaching is (as if they discovered this, and academics did not know), they are not listening to the people attending their courses if those people feel utterly patronised and frustrated at the waste of their time. If academics treated their students like educationalists treat their student academics they'd be appalling teachers. A simple course allowing us to learn from a video of our own lectures would be immensely useful. Instead whole empires of education have developed that need to justify themselves and grow, so they subject us to educational jargon and make us write essays on the educationalist's pet theory.