OPLS blog

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. To quote from their overview:

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.

Let us know how you get on.

Update:

Maggie Tsai, one of the founders of Diigo, is running an Elluminate session specifically for educators on 20 November in case you’re interested.  Password link is here and the agenda will consider the following:

1. Quick overview of the bookmarking and annotating features of Diigo - highlighting the Diigolet as an alternative to the Diigo toolbar for districts that prevent teachers from downloading browser extensions
2. How to register for Diigo & convert a regular user account to educator status
3. How to create class groups via Teacher Console
4. Safety and security features for class groups
5. Setting preferences for class groups (tag dictionary, forum, etc.)
6. How to create student accounts and add them to class groups
7. Safety and security features for student accounts
8. Why use Diigo with students?
9. How to integrate Diigo content on class blogs, wikis, etc. / Webslide view / Starting research on Diigo (if time permits)
10. Common FAQs
11. Share Diigo education usecases
12. Open discussions

There’s a discussion on it in Diigo here.  Classroom 2.0 have it as well.

Although it’s been out for a while, we haven’t seen any this side of the Atlantic until quite recently, so it was quite a privilege to be able to play with a Microsoft Surface at the Future of Web Apps conference held in London a couple of weeks ago.

I took a few photos and uploaded them to Flickr with annotations.

While I was having a play, my mind was buzzing with possibilities for how it could be used in teaching in learning. Obviously it would have immediate appeal to spatial learners and those who want to ’show’ what they know or have learned. I could also imagine a small number of students brainstorming together, perhaps using some mind-mapping software and working on individual elements of an issue in ‘their part’ of the display/screen.

There are already some great software and applications written for it (check out the photos on microbiology in the stream above and how it renders 3-D imaging) and the list will only grow as it becomes more mainstream.  What’s really important, though, is the notion that it can receive multiple instructions simultaneously through touch - and that makes it immediately appealing for an educational context; even if the price tag doesn’t at US$15,000.

Here’s Microsoft’s original promo video:

And the inevitable parody

I promised a review of Imagine Teacher for the Nintendo DS, in the vain hope that it would help teachers in some way with their own professional development. Well, the short answer is, it won’t!

I looked for insights into classroom strategies, help with identifying student learning styles, curriculum planning and perhaps learning space design. I think I was being a little optimistic.

The game is as taxing on the brain as watching Celebrity Big Brother, and, to be honest, I shouldn’t have devoted the amount of time I did in getting to know it, hoping against hope that I’d uncover a few nuggets of wisdom somewhere.

You’re better off using the pictochat feature on the DS and collaborating with peers across the staffroom.

Best avoided.

Many of you will probably know the great global issues comparison site, WorldMapper. Well now, many of the maps included on the site have been reproduced in a book entitled: The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the way we live by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford.

(Clicking on the image will take you to Amazon US)

It contains 366 digitally modified maps, or cartograms, depicting the areas and countries of the world not by their physical size but by their demographic importance on a vast range of subjects, ranging from population, health, wealth and occupation, to how many toys we import and who’s eating their vegetables.

Well worth pointing out to your librarians.

YouTube have just announced the release of a new video uploader which, they claim, enables users to:

• add a video’s metadata (title, description, tags, etc.) while the upload is processing.
• upload multiple files at once, without downloading a plugin.
• take advantage of increased file-size limits for uploads - raised from 100MB to 1GB.

Good news for heavy users and those wishing to upload more than five minutes of footage.

In case you don’t know, wikispaces are giving away an additional 250,000 wikis to teachers and schools (no ads, greater administrative rights etc).

Grab yours from here now.

…And if that wasn’t enough, Google have just launched an audio indexing engine for YouTube. Now you can search a video according to what is said within it and not just on the tags, keywords or title describing it.

It’s in beta at the moment, but will graduate into a fully supported technology soon, I’m sure.

As an update to the previous post, Chad Hurley (the CEO and co-founder of YouTube) has just blogged on the future of online video.

Some key comments:

“Today, 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and we believe the volume will continue to grow exponentially.”

“Our goal is to allow every person on the planet to participate by making the upload process as simple as placing a phone call.”

“In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication.”

“Over the next decade, people will be at the center of their video and media experience. More and more consumers will become creators.”

A typical response to presentations I have given to IB leadership on social media and education technology is, “That’s all very well, but my school district or education authority bans this technology.”

Well, for all those who are faced with this problem, this video by Michael Wesch is for you. It’s an academic’s response to the transformative power of YouTube and why we need to understand it better. It was presented in June this year, at the US Library of Congress.

The video is nearly an hour long, so it’s best viewed with colleagues and coffee (and possibly at home?).

Michael has published a timeline, which I have copied for convenience below.

0:00 Introduction, YouTube’s Big Numbers

2:00 Numa Numa and the Celebration of Webcams

5:53 The Machine is Us/ing Us and the New Mediascape

12:16 Introducing our Research Team

12:56 Who is on YouTube?

13:25 What’s on Youtube? Charlie Bit My Finger, Soulja Boy, etc.

17:04 5% of vids are personal vlogs addressed to the YouTube community, Why?

17:30 YouTube in context. The loss of community and “networked individualism” (Wellman)

18:41 Cultural Inversion: individualism and community

19:15 Understanding new forms of community through Participant Observation

21:18 YouTube as a medium for community

23:00 Our first vlogs

25:00 The webcam: Everybody is watching where nobody is (“context collapse”)

26:05 Re-cognition and new forms of self-awareness (McLuhan)

27:58 The Anonymity of Watching YouTube: Haters and Lovers

29:53 Aesthetic Arrest

30:25 Connection without Constraint

32:35 Free Hugs: A hero for our mediated culture

34:02 YouTube Drama: Striving for popularity

34:55 An early star: emokid21ohio

36:55 YouTube’s Anthenticity Crisis: the story of LonelyGirl15

39:50 Reflections on Authenticity

41:54 Gaming the system / Exposing the System

43:37 Seriously Playful Participatory Media Culture

47:32 Networked Production: The Collab. MadV’s “The Message” and the message of YouTube

49:29 Poem: The Little Glass Dot, The Eyes of the World

51:15 Conclusion by bnessel1973

52:50 Dedication and Credits (Our Numa Numa dance)

Enjoy!

Andrew Keen wrote an interesting short piece in the Independent’s media supplement recently on a new American website called OpposingViews.com - a digital debating chamber for proven experts in politics, economics, culture, science and faith.

Keen argues that “it offers convincing proof that Web 2.0’s cult of amateur content is rapidly going out of fashion and that the Internet’s new “new thing” is expertise”.

I’m not so sure.  For me it simply highlights, once more, the imperative to critically evaluate sources and content, developing one’s own judgement in the process.  This would certainly be the approach I would take when looking at OpposingViews.

A great TOK lesson in the making too, I think, when you consider it is the likes of Amnesty International who say “Yes” to the question: “Should the US abolish the death penalty?” and Joshua Marquis, a District Attorney in the US and media commentator, who says “No”.

One for you to ponder.