Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

To those who Twitter, the reporter who investigates a story before offering it to the public must also seem tediously ruminant. On Twitter, the notes become the story, devoid of even five minutes of reflection on the writer's way to the computer. I can see that there are times —an airplane landing in the Hudson, a presidential election in Iran—when this type of impromptu journalism becomes a necessity, and an exciting one at that. Luckily, reporters still exist to make sense of information bytes and expand upon them for readers—but for how much longer? I worry that microblogging cheats my students out of their trump card: a mindful attention to the subject in front of them, so that they can capture its sights and sounds, its smells and tactile qualities, to share with readers. How can Twittering stories from laptops and phones possibly replace the attentive journalist who tucks a digital recorder artfully under a notepad, pencil behind one ear, and gives full attention to the subject at hand?

I went home after the lecture and—hypocritically, I admit—updated my Facebook status and my blog to declare how much I despise Twitter.

Twitter serves as a source of links to longer news stories.

Right now, in Geneva, at the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization, history is being made. For the first time in WIPO history, the body that creates the world's copyright treaties is attempting to write a copyright treaty dedicated to protecting the interests of copyright users, not just copyright owners. At issue is a treaty to protect the rights of blind people and people with other disabilities that affect reading (people with dyslexia, people who are paralyzed or lack arms or hands for turning pages), introduced by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay. This should be a slam dunk: who wouldn't want a harmonized system of copyright exceptions that ensure that it's possible for disabled people to get access to the written word? The USA, that's who. The Obama administration's negotiators have joined with a rogue's gallery of rich country trade representatives to oppose protection for blind people. Other nations and regions opposing the rights of blind people include Canada and the EU. Update: Also opposing rights for disabled people: Australia, New Zealand, the Vatican and Norway.

What makes professional development even more frustrating to practitioners is that most of the programs we are exposed to are drawn directly from the latest craze sweeping the business world. In the past 10 years, countless schools have read Who Moved My Cheese?, studied The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, learned to have "Crucial Conversations," and tried to move "from Good to Great."

With the investment of a bit of time and effort, I've found a group of writers to follow who expose me to more interesting ideas in one day than I've been exposed to in the past 10 years of costly professional development. Professional growth for me starts with 20 minutes of blog browsing each morning, sifting through the thoughts of practitioners whom I might never have been able to learn from otherwise and considering how their work translates into what I do with students.

This learning has been uniquely authentic, driven by personal interests and connected to classroom realities. Blogs have introduced a measure of differentiation and challenge to my professional learning plan that had long been missing. I wrestle over the characteristics of effective professional development with Patrick Higgins (http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com) and the elements of high-quality instruction for middle grades students with Dina Strasser (http://theline.edublogs.org). Scott McLeod (www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org) forces me to think about driving school change from the system level; and Nancy Flanagan (http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/teacher_in_a_strange_land) helps me understand the connections between education policy and classroom practice. John Holland (http://circle-time.blogspot.com) and Larry Ferlazzo, Brian Crosby, and Alice Mercer (http://inpractice.edublogs.org) open my eyes to the challenges of working in high-needs communities.

What I like is that Diggo not only lets you easily save items, it lets you highlight the "good parts" so that when you go back to the article you can easily find them. That turned out to be a real asset when I was working on my part of the JACC Norcal keynote a couple weeks ago.It's been a real pressure cooker of a semester, so I had very little time to put my JACC presentation together. However, I'd been bookmarking, highlighting and saving relevant blog posts and articles into my JACC list on Diigo (yes, you can categorize what you save) for weeks. So when I finally sat down to create a presentation, I had everything I needed at my fingertips. I was able to put it all together in a day. (By the way, you can view that presentation, Journalism in the Starbucks Era, on SlideShare, another great online tool.)But after downloading a Diigo update this morning, I realized I'm just scratching the surface of what you can do with Diigo. For example, my previous blog post on Greenspan's sudden epiphany...well, I posted it direct from Diigo while reading and bookmarking the article. Pretty cool, huh?When I ran through Diigo's "how-to" overview this morning, I found several other things I didn't know. In addition to using the one-click "Send to Blog" feature, you can also use Diigo's "send" feature to:send annotated and highlighted pages by emailpost to other websites such as twitter, facebook, delicious, etc.Cool! I'm using it for a tweet next.

But what really caught my attention was the idea of using Diigo as a hub for group research projects. You can set up a group Diigo account to share bookmarks, and make it public, private or semi-private. This has real potential for students working on group projects, especially since Diigo's "sticky note" feature also lets you add comments to the material you save, in addition to highlighting key passages.OK, I'm sold! I'm going to start demo-ing Diigo for my students.