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.

I often turn to Stephen Heppell when considering next steps and looking for help in making sense of this new world we’re living in. Recently I came across this. I shan’t try and paraphrase this time, but let his own words speak to you.

“Computers are everyday tools for us all, seen or unseen, but their value in learning is as tools for creativity and learning rather than as machines to “deliver” the curriculum. These tools, in our children’s hands, are forever pushing the envelope of expertise that previous technologies excluded them from: they compose, quantise and perform music before acquiring any ability to play an instrument, they shoot, edit and stream digital video before any support from media courses, they produce architectural fly-throughs of incredible buildings without any drafting or 2D skills, they make stop frame animations with their plasticine models, they edit and finesse their poetry, they explore surfaces on their visual calculators, swap ideas with scientists on-line about volcanic activity, follow webcam images of Ospreys hatching, track weather by live satellite images, control the robots they have built and generally push rapidly at the boundaries of what might be possible, indeed what was formerly possible, at any age.

Little of this was easily achieved in the school classroom ten years ago although the many projects emanating from Ultralab over that decade offered clear enough indicators of what might be possible. The challenge here is to criterion referencing. So often the cry of the teacher “that work is better than my degree exhibition piece!” reflects a substantial step change in both the age at which a creative act can be enjoyed and the quality of the tools supporting that creativity.”

So, if you want some guidance on what we might do as educators to evaluate some of this, have a look at what he has to say here.

Although “best of…” posts tend to appear reasonably frequently, the good ones are worth their weight in gold. Here are a couple of blog posts summarising the best Web 2.0 applications of 2007, in so far as they relate to teaching and learning, and as proposed by Larry Ferlazzo and Silvia Tolisano:

Larry Ferlazzo’s best Web 2.0 applications for 2007

Langwitches best web 2.0 applications for elementary school

You are, of course, free to agree or disagree.

Please note that these were shared via the Classroom 2.0 network on Ning.

For those of you who enjoyed Michael Wesch’s first video, the Machine is Us/ing Us, you might want to have a look at his follow-up, Information R/Evolution:

It’s a great exposition of the power of tagging.