My first experiences with Diigo were not promising. I found it a barren, rocky land where my bookmarks could find no purchase. The layouts were poor, the instructions confusing, and for the life of me I could not figure out how to bookmark anything. I considered rending my clothes and despairing in dust and ashes. Then Caroline helpfully pointed out that I was actually on the site www.digg.com rather than Diigo. Once again my selective dyslexia betrayed me. After I actually found the correct site I began to see what the fuss was all about. And now you can see my super-fabulous museum of awesomeness on these here internets at the following site: http://www.diigo.com/user/psychodawg2000.
So now that I actually have a Diigo site and a chance to play around a bit I'll give my thoughts and the implications. First, i really like the site. I had been using google bookmarks as my primary online bookmarking site and while it was fine, it really couldn't touch the features and interactivity of diigo. The best feature for me is the ability to search for common tags or to browse the bookmarks of people who have saved common websites. This is critical because a lot of the websites I use for work are a bit, shall we say, esoteric. Websites on statistical analysis, databases of ed research, etc. As these are often hosted on university websites or otherwise obscure they often elude the Boolean engines of google and other search platforms. Being able to actually work through the bookmarks of people with similar interests and careers was immeasurably helpful. Within about 15 minutes of browsing I had bookmarked 5 new websites on stats that I had not been aware of. Very cool.
In a way, Diigo seems to operate like one of the classic research tricks anyone in the sciences is taught in grad school. Namely, if you are interested in a subject area, find a recent journal article. Work backwards through the references, find those articles, and then work through their references. Within a few hours you can pretty much have the entire corpus of that particular research field. Perhaps more interestingly, the Diigo model pretty accurately reflects the working of the brain's neural associational networks and the general model of memory. One memory datum (think tag) and it is associated with other bits of memory (think other users with the same tags and then the users who share their tags) and in the end those networks of associations are what create memory and consciousness. It's no wonder some philosophers are actively considering the question of whether the Internet itself could ever achieve consciousness.
That high falutin' thinking aside I did find some downsides. While I think Caroline is exactly correct in that having as many tags as possible is the key to making Diigo an effective social bookmarking tool, the sheer volume of how many bookmarks many individuals I visited had makes even multiple tags difficult to operate. When the user has 3,500 bookmarks (as some I visited had) even if they are providing 5-6 tags per bookmark it becomes tedious to slog trough 250 links per tag. I think I'd like to keep mine a bit more streamlined. Some users appear to simply bookmark anything they find remotely interesting. I think this detracts from the ability to communicate effectively the difference between a high quality and low quality link. In a way I guess this comes down to whether you wish Diigo to be a tool for you, or as a platform for social bookmarking. If you prefer the former 3,000 bookmarks is probably inevitable. If the latter, quality is (I think) preferable to quantity. To each their own.
Some things I have yet to have a chance to fully explore. Later today I'm going to upload some (I think) relevant bookmarks to our 23 things group and I'd like to find some like minded groups to join. I also have yet to find a use for the annotations feature (although this is probably a function of my staggering laziness rather than the utility of the annotations feature itself). I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised by Diigo. I imagine this will be a major tool I use for as long as we are all around. Which according to the Mayan Calendar is three more years. Maseltov!
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Things 2, 3, 4...well you get the picture
I suppose a more rigid mind would expect (nay demand) that each thing in 2 - 5 have its own blog post. However I decided to apply my ability to synthesize information (Bloom's Taxonomy! Holla at ya boy!) and combine them into one epic post. In essence I don't think this is unreasonable as all three deal with the overarching concept of using blogs in education and feeding them through RSS Feeds into reader applications. Many things in this class will be new and foreign to me and thus cause me to curl up into the fetal position murmuring quietly to myself (which I normally do 3-4 times a day anyway). But in this case we have hit an application that I have been using for a long while so this should simply be an overview of what I already do.
I love blogs. I don't necessarily love blogging, but I love reading blogs. I subscribe to about 80 blogs on my google reader account organized in various categories. Here's a screenshot I took this morning of my account so you can see how they are organized.
I have my blogs organized into 9 discrete categories. I do subscribe to several blogs in the educational and educational psychology realm. Which can be seen below.
Among the sites I read regularly are Edutopia, Curriculum Matters, the SPED law blog, the flypaper (the in-house blog of the educational think tank the Fordham Foundation), and several blogs pertaining to psychological assessment. All of them are occasionally interesting, often brilliant, but most of time pure grade A filler with little utility. The beauty of Google Reader (and it is of course not the only application that will do this) is how easily and quickly it lets you filter through to find the wheat among the chaff.
I will say I have found precious few blogs that really fit my needs, and I certainly have looked. Their are any number of hundreds of blogs dealing with teaching, instructional strategies, and other global education topics. This is both appropriate and heartening. But I have struggled to find blogs that deal with my particular intersection of interests and skills, that being assessment, educational policy, educational research, and statistical analysis. Given that their appears to be a vacuum I may have to take my web 2.0 skills and simply fill that void myself with the ultimate testing/stats/research/education blog. After all, with those topics their must be literally TENS of people yearning to read that. Of course blogging is by nature a bit narcissistic (not that there is anything wrong with that) so perhaps that isn't a problem. So I'll leave you with the axiom of the day.
Blogging: Giving outlet to the voices in your head 24/7
I love blogs. I don't necessarily love blogging, but I love reading blogs. I subscribe to about 80 blogs on my google reader account organized in various categories. Here's a screenshot I took this morning of my account so you can see how they are organized.
I have my blogs organized into 9 discrete categories. I do subscribe to several blogs in the educational and educational psychology realm. Which can be seen below.
Among the sites I read regularly are Edutopia, Curriculum Matters, the SPED law blog, the flypaper (the in-house blog of the educational think tank the Fordham Foundation), and several blogs pertaining to psychological assessment. All of them are occasionally interesting, often brilliant, but most of time pure grade A filler with little utility. The beauty of Google Reader (and it is of course not the only application that will do this) is how easily and quickly it lets you filter through to find the wheat among the chaff.
I will say I have found precious few blogs that really fit my needs, and I certainly have looked. Their are any number of hundreds of blogs dealing with teaching, instructional strategies, and other global education topics. This is both appropriate and heartening. But I have struggled to find blogs that deal with my particular intersection of interests and skills, that being assessment, educational policy, educational research, and statistical analysis. Given that their appears to be a vacuum I may have to take my web 2.0 skills and simply fill that void myself with the ultimate testing/stats/research/education blog. After all, with those topics their must be literally TENS of people yearning to read that. Of course blogging is by nature a bit narcissistic (not that there is anything wrong with that) so perhaps that isn't a problem. So I'll leave you with the axiom of the day.
Blogging: Giving outlet to the voices in your head 24/7
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Thing 1-B
As I read through the Web 2.0 materials that Caroline helpfully prepared for us I was struck by the consistent use two terms. Namely community and interactivity. I don't know that these terms were used in their absolute forms but any number of synonyms and related terms were deployed.
This put me in the mode of a fascinating book that came out by a political scientist named Robert Putnam a few years back entitled Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Professor Putnam's thesis in a nutshell was that as America became increasingly more diverse and dynamic (which he feels is an almost unmitigated good) an unfortunate byproduct was the breakdown of traditional civic and social structures that had often nurtured ideas of civic good, Civic Pride, shared responsibility, and (their really is no other way to say it) a virtuous, community based life. Instead, what was replaced was an often isolated, cut off culture in which people withdraw from community. His title came from the observation that while the number of individuals who bowled had increased over the past 20 years, the number of league bowlers had shrank to almost nothing. Bowling in leagues versus bowling alone become a metaphor the whole book hinges on about the whole loss of community and social cohesion of American Society in the latter half of the 20th century.
This isn't a post designed to weight the merits and demerits of his argument (suffice it so say I disagree with some of his ideas, even as I find the basic thesis compelling), but instead to point out that in many ways Web 2.0 seems almost tailor made to serve as a fill-in, a kind of proxy community that has been lost. My mother finds twitter and facebook to be completely useless (why should I care if a friend of mine just watched a movie and for some reason wants to tell me about it?) and while I agree that much of social networking is utterly prosaic and banal, another part of me thinks that, trivial though it be, the need to share ones life with others is an important, and often overlooked, aspect of the human experience. Web communities allow individuals of similar likes and interests to network, communicate, share, and, yes, in many cases come to care for one another. They can nourish creativity, critiques of ideas, and opening up of new ideas to people who, without web 2.0 technology, would often never meet in real life. To use an overused cliche, it flattens the barriers of time and geography to create communities in ways that were never possible before.
It is true of course that much of what goes on in interactive communities and web 2.0 applications is, well, crap. But remember Sturgeon's Law (click link for more). 90% of everthing is crap, or at least nothing to get excited over. But their is no doubt for me that in that 10% where true quality lies Web 2.0 applications have at least the possiblity of allowing individuals to recapture that sense of community that was lost over much of the past decades.
P.S. My open mindedness ends at Twitter though. In twitter I am still a "get off of my lawn you kids" stick in the mud.
This put me in the mode of a fascinating book that came out by a political scientist named Robert Putnam a few years back entitled Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Professor Putnam's thesis in a nutshell was that as America became increasingly more diverse and dynamic (which he feels is an almost unmitigated good) an unfortunate byproduct was the breakdown of traditional civic and social structures that had often nurtured ideas of civic good, Civic Pride, shared responsibility, and (their really is no other way to say it) a virtuous, community based life. Instead, what was replaced was an often isolated, cut off culture in which people withdraw from community. His title came from the observation that while the number of individuals who bowled had increased over the past 20 years, the number of league bowlers had shrank to almost nothing. Bowling in leagues versus bowling alone become a metaphor the whole book hinges on about the whole loss of community and social cohesion of American Society in the latter half of the 20th century.
This isn't a post designed to weight the merits and demerits of his argument (suffice it so say I disagree with some of his ideas, even as I find the basic thesis compelling), but instead to point out that in many ways Web 2.0 seems almost tailor made to serve as a fill-in, a kind of proxy community that has been lost. My mother finds twitter and facebook to be completely useless (why should I care if a friend of mine just watched a movie and for some reason wants to tell me about it?) and while I agree that much of social networking is utterly prosaic and banal, another part of me thinks that, trivial though it be, the need to share ones life with others is an important, and often overlooked, aspect of the human experience. Web communities allow individuals of similar likes and interests to network, communicate, share, and, yes, in many cases come to care for one another. They can nourish creativity, critiques of ideas, and opening up of new ideas to people who, without web 2.0 technology, would often never meet in real life. To use an overused cliche, it flattens the barriers of time and geography to create communities in ways that were never possible before.
It is true of course that much of what goes on in interactive communities and web 2.0 applications is, well, crap. But remember Sturgeon's Law (click link for more). 90% of everthing is crap, or at least nothing to get excited over. But their is no doubt for me that in that 10% where true quality lies Web 2.0 applications have at least the possiblity of allowing individuals to recapture that sense of community that was lost over much of the past decades.
P.S. My open mindedness ends at Twitter though. In twitter I am still a "get off of my lawn you kids" stick in the mud.
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