Porter Palmer sent me this email and I thought I'd share it here:

You mentioned delicious in a recent tweet, and it made me think I should share with you the delicious site I created for Discovery Education Assessment. It started as an internal way for us to share bookmarks for a URL to taxonomy mapping project, but the more I added the more useful I thought it might be for teachers. http://delicious.com/discoveryea

If you think it might be helpful, please feel free to share it with the teachers here in San Antonio.

How do you put a value on Delicious link sharing?

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: Education, MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools

When Diigo stopped producing my linkroll for my ShareMore! Wiki sidebar, I decided to switch to Delicious. Diigo.com has made that easy...do your bookmarking, highlighting, annotating in Diigo and copies are put into Delicious.com automatically. Here's what the sidebar with my favorite articles (that I've written) looks like on my wiki:

To get this, I decided to use Delicious.com Linkrolls--accessible via HELP--to generate the code which looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/js/mguhlin/mgwrites?icon=rss&count=30&sort=date&name&showadd"></script>

The word in bold is the tag, or keyword, that I use to identify items I want to see in the sidebar when I'm bookmarking something. Here's the linkroll creation page:

Hoping this is helpful to someone...Delicious.com has been very robust, as of late.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools, TechTips

On the front page of the Moodle site, I want to see a list of feeds that I've bookmarked and tagged a certain way. For awhile, I was using Diigo.com to provide the RSS feed, but have since switched to Delicious.com. All these services have times when they are up or down, but Delicious bookmarks RSS feed--which I'm using elsewhere--seems to be up more than Diigo. This is purely subjective on my part...who knows if they're really slow/down/whatever on their end (UPDATE: See image below) but my perception from where I'm at is they're "down" or so slow as to be down.

So, here's what success looks like:

So, I went to my respective social bookmarking tools and copied the link for the RSS feed for these bookmarks:

and immediately encountered why my Diigo RSS feed wasn't showing up:

Outage Date and Time: Saturday, 08/16/2008; 9:21 AM (CST)
Still down when I published this blog post at 9:33 AM.

But here is wha the tag search looks like in Delicious:

Step 1: Do a search on your particular tag (e.g. sapodcasts is my tag)

Step 2: Copy-n-Paste the RSS Feed Link

In Moodle ...

Then...

Afterwards...

After that, you'll see your RSS feed displayed in your sidebar, wherever you placed the Remote RSS feeds block. It's just too easy with moodle.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: MGuhlin.net, Moodle, SocialBookmarkingTools, TechTips

Recently, someone sent me a direct tweet asking, "How do you embed Diigo WebSlides on a page?"

Would you know how I could embed Diigo Webslides on my blog - but not in a widget - on a page - I'd really appreciate the help - thanks!!

Update 07/26/2008;1:49PM: That request confused me a bit. Apparently, the request is to figure out how to get the Diigo slide show to play in place rather than click on the "widget" and go to another page. I don't think Diigo embeds the WebSlides in a way that will play, as if you were embedding a flash movie UNLESS you're using the FULL-SIZE 600x400 sized web slide shows. Of course, you can use the Play in Place generated code (more info below) and then adjust the code size. Note that I made the correction to the spelling of "boder" and changed it to "border."

<iframe frameborder='no' src='http://slides.diigo.com/widget/slides?sid=5492&mode=onfull' marginheight='0' marginwidth='0' border='0' height='500' width='600' style='border: 2px solid #C3D9FF;'></iframe>

resize it to make it smaller to fit your blog entry's preferred size:

<iframe frameborder='no' src='http://slides.diigo.com/widget/slides?sid=5492&mode=onfull' marginheight='0' marginwidth='0' border='0' height='200' width='300' style='border: 2px solid #C3D9FF;'></iframe>

Original Blog Entry:

So, here's a quick tour of the steps I took to get the Diigo WebSlide embedded above....

Then, you'll end up at a screen like this one....

Then...

The embed code--use the Play in Place code, not the thumbnail code and adjust the height and width to your needs--looks like this:

<iframe marginwidth="0" height="400" width="500" src="http://slides.diigo.com/widget/slides?sid=5492&mode=onfull" style="border: 2px solid #C3D9FF" marginheight="0" frameborder="no" border="0"> </iframe>

But you can easily change the height and width to match the dimensions you want. I've bolded the numbers to be changed.

I couldn't help but notice that "border" was mis-spelled as "boder" so that's a correction that the Diigo folks need to make. The mis-spelling occurs on both embed codes generated by Diigo, 600x400 or 205x155. That may cause an error <smile>.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools, TechTips

Image Source: http://fm-i.org/images/img_teamFMi.jpg

Dave Fleet shares some suggestions for online monitoring of your organization's image, or the buzz around it. He says it's important that before you do anything--such as set up a blog, whatever--that you find out how to track what's going on out there. I see his suggestions as part and parcel of establishing your own Global Communications Center for your school or District. Fleet writes:

Before your organization launches a blog, before you start playing with Facebook, before you even think about Twitter, you should be listening to what people are saying about you.

"Google is managing your identity unless you are," as quoted by Dean Shareski in his Going Global, Going Public. "What digital footprints are existing for you right now? It's not an ego search but to find what others are saying about you." This goes for each of us, but also, for organizations like schools. But it's important we go, as Dean and others share, beyond just tracking our digital footprints, but that of others' footprints when they interact with our organizations.

As an edublogger, this is something I learned while setting up my blog and finding ways to connect with others. However, the tools that are available now are much more comprehensive than what were available when I began. A quick look at Dave's suggestions, and I'm astonished that I'm using most of these approaches already. What I doubt is happening, though, is that school districts and schools are doing this...most of our organizations may very well have a less than active interaction with news and other people out there. Simply publishing your own television show isn't enough when most people thrive online, and most content endures online more than in a broadcast.

I love this quote (Christian Grantham as cited in NewAssignment.net) about ending the "passive relationship with local news" in this blog entry. What catches my attention is that the same tribulations and troubles students, teachers and leaders are going through, well, that's what a lot of folks in the news industry are going through. You could tweak this paragraph easily to reflect the angst among educators:

I love working with people who see the importance of the role the net will play in transforming the way the world gets and interacts with information. I also love working with veterans of news, and I will always remember the challenges they face with the changes that are happening. For some, that change is very difficult. But the fact is, we are no more in the television and newspaper business than Wal-Mart is in the trucking business. Our business is no longer the industry that surrounds distribution – the trucks, the printing press, the reams of paper, the broadcast towers, the satellite dishes, the lights, the huge cameras, the buildings, the “live trucks”…

It’s the final product: information. The market in an on-demand world for news and information where people have to wait to receive a highly produced product is steadily shrinking. At the same time, the online audience for news and information is growing significantly. It’s an exciting time to be working in a new medium that is transforming the way we get information.

How has our "business" in education changed? It's no longer about textbooks, that's for sure and canned ideas. It's about creativity, communication, collaboration. Even as the market shrinks in the news world, in the education world, I find this statement to be as true as it's ever been in education (BTW, the link below includes a Clay Shirky moment in video):

If our information was made freely available and became the building blocks through which other work could be done - we would be the foundation upon which the news and information world is built upon.
Source: DigiDave - Journalism is a Process, Not a Product: Changing the Legal Structure for Digital Journalism

That education is still the foundation--albeit being switfly eroding--is because it is firmly entrenched in a "no market" environment.

Dave points to 4 steps and I've included links to some with sample searches for "mguhlin" in each:

1. Define your keywords
2. Create your searches...some of the tools Dave shares include:
   -GoogleNews
   -GoogleBlogSearch
   -Technorati
   -TwitterSearch (Dave mentions Summize, recently acquired by Twitter.com, and TweetScan)
   -Blogpulse.com
3. Plug the results into your RSS reader OR
4. Collapse all the results RSS feeds into a service like AideRSS.com (I've included a list of Tools4RSS here)

One additional type of tool that I'd add to Dave's list includes Social Bookmarking sites. The idea comes to me from a presentation Alan November did in China (Learning2.0 Conference) where an audience member suggested using Del.icio.us as another search tool in lieu or addition to regular search engines. 3 skills November says aren't taught in schools include:

1. Teaching students to deal with massive quantities of information (pattern-making, organizing patterns for information)
2. Global Communication skills/global communication, as well as checking sources with people on the ground
3. Self-directed, lifelong learning

What's neat about becoming your own "global communications center" is that you can teach students these skills as you're setting up your classroom web site. Imagine what would have happened if Bob Sprankle and Darren Kuropatwa had set these tools (if they'd been available) BEFORE they started blogging with their students. Wouldn't it have been awesome to capture the feedback flowing in from all over the world, including traditional and participatory reporting?

WHAT ABOUT SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES?
It would definitely be fun to know how many folks are bookmarking what you're doing, and you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of results. To accomplish that, you'll probably need to use Page2Rss.com--a tool someone told me about but a week or two ago (speak up if you're out there!). Neither Diigo or Delicious, as far as I can see, support RSS for search results. So, with that caveat in mind, to the list, I'm adding these two:

• Diigo.com - RSS wasn't available via Page2Rss.com since Diigo timed out.
• Del.icio.us - RSS

OTHER TOOLS
A few other tools worth checking out include these:

• IceRocket.com - RSS
• Teoma.com
• Spy ...lacks an RSS feed but you can get one with Page2RSS (not sure yet how well it works). Lets you know what's going on in Twitter, FriendFeed, Blogs, and Google Reader.

Though I had some of these items setup (Technorati, TwitterSearch) I didn't have all of them setup. As a result, I discovered some new blog entries out there--and new blogs I wasn't reading--writing about what I'd written. Nice to be in touch!

GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS CENTER
You know, I hadn't ever thought of myself--or the work the Communications Dept in a school district--does as Global Communications. But, that is exactly what we're doing with Read/Write Web tools. And, that is the challenge facing districts as well as journalists. We are caught up in a "citizen" journalism, teacher communicator.

"Should learning professionals be leading the charge around new work literacies such as social media and informal learning?" Good question. My answer: yes. Because everyone should be. Tucker writes, "my responsibility is to work on my own sphere of influence, starting with our online course development team leading by example for our facilitators." Christy Tucker, Experiencing E-Learning
Source: As commented on and cited by Stephen Downes

How are YOU setting up your Global Communications Center? How are YOU leading the charge? The answer to this question is a lot easier than taking this position:

Al Gore said: "We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift." He was talking about global climate change but he might as well have been talking about our attempts to transition schools into the 21st century…
Source: Our Policies have to Shift, Dr. Scott McLeod, Dangerously Irrelevant

Compare that approach--abandoning the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve the crisis in education, or journalism--to this one from Pete Reilly (EdTech Journeys) with his tale of Gandhi's decision to not offer advice unless he was living by it himself.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: CitizenJournalism, Education, MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools, TechTips

Thanks to Monica Martinez, TCEA Training Director, I recently had the opportunity to add two new workshops to my TCEA 2009 State Conference presentations. Both 3 hour workshops include Thinkfinity. The outline below is my draft outline for the second of the two workshops. Read the first outline here.

Session Title
Sliding Thinkfinity into the Curriculum using Diigo

Type: Hands-on

Skill Level
Introduction

School Level
K-12

Strand 1

Strand 2

Special Needs:
-Internet Explorer or Firefox with Diigo Installed

Short Description
Learn to how to use Thinkfinity.org high quality resources, as well as manage and share them using your social bookmarking tool of choice.

Summary
Thinkfinity.org offers a rich variety of online lesson plans, online manipulatives or interactive tools, and content. But how can you easily manage and share these resources with your students and colleagues? Learn how to use a social bookmarking tool like Diigo.com--or Del.icio.us--to create audio narrated slide shows, add comments, and post comments online. You'll learn how to use Diigo.com to maximize your Thinkfinity.org usage.

Detailed Description
After installing Diigo.com social bookmarking tool on their browser of preference, participants will use it to organize and track their favorite Thinkfinity resources, learning how to use and contribute to an online community--which can represent their students or colleagues--centered around adapting Thinkfinity.org resources, online manipulatives, and lesson plans for use in their education setting.

Participants will first create their Diigo account, explore Thinkfinity.org resources that correlate to their specific instructional goals, then highlight and add electronic "post-it notes" to the resources. After exploring the various Thinkfinity tools, participants will learn how to create a slide show of their work for sharing with others.

Participants in the session will have the opportunity to contribute to an enhanced podcast for the session, as well as add their ideas to a wiki. The wiki will be available after the session at http://thinkfinitytexas.wikispaces.com/

Technology Tools

Web Sites:

• Thinkfinity.org
• ThinkfinityTexas.wikispaces.com
• Tutorial: Diigo Slides
• Tutorial/Resources for Del.icio.us: Social Bookmarking

Software:

• Diigo Add-on for Internet Explorer and/or Firefox or Flock

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: Education, MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools, Texas

It seems obvious now that we should add RSS feeds from Delicious or Diigo to our front page. A few months ago, maybe it was longer, I had my team add an RSS feed for a Delicious tag "itnews2007"

Assigning a year to the tag was a mistake since I'm still using it in 2008, but the fact is that I can easily bookmark something in Diigo (which automatically drops into Delicious) and see the link show up in the front page of our web site's sidebar (right side). Or, if you're a campus, you stumble across a classroom blog entry or neat resource to share, you simply bookmark it and it's there...immediately.

Howard Owens--focused on journalism and news web sites--writes:

Online is about information grazing. Reading print is a more leisurely activity, even if it’s just 20 minutes over toast and coffee before rushing off to work. Train your newsroom staff to keep that web site fresh, and then let them take their time on writing the really important stories in a way that provides meaning and context; for an added bonus, make sure those longer stories are well written, since print readers — shocking revelation here — like to read.

On a daily basis, a good reporter should be able to produce three or four web updates (some call it breaking news) and then pick one of those items to turn into a quality, longer print story (or have some other print-appropriate piece in the pipeline).
Source: Spare me the fancy redesigns and give me some text to read

Of course, we gave up print some time ago. We no longer send out PDFs via email--although some departments still do--but instead drop it into our online publication. There's a world full of ideas and information to draw from. The value-added of our group is selecting what to share from an infinite variety of awesome ideas.

How are you taking advantage of RSS and the wealth of resources and ideas to enhance your school district/department/campus web site?

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: CitizenJournalism, Education, MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools

Received the following...

SocialMatic is a Social Bookmarking site which not only allows users to submit and share their bookmarks but also help them to submit their bookmarks to 13 more popular bookmarking sites. In another words, it actually help to drive more traffic and exposure for your site, and save your time from submitting to other social bookmarking site. And if is possible, just reply back to our mail and we could even sign up the account for you.

Therefore, do visit www.SocialMatic.com to find out more about us, and sign up a free SocialMatic account to join the SocialMatic network. Feel free to contact us if you have any doubts or question by sending a mail to Socialmatic.team@gmail.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Hope you to hear from you soon. Thank You for your time.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: Press_Releases, SocialBookmarkingTools

UPDATE 06/23/2008:
Success! I tried it on Windows using Audacity and the recently downloaded LAME MP3 encoder. You can check it out here: http://slides.diigo.com/list/mguhlin/tpoetry

The audio narration isn't that great (sigh) but hey, it was just a test recording. I'm going to dump Audacity on my Mac, get rid of the LAME MP3 encoder, wipe the preferences, and re-download everything. I'm hoping this isn't Windows platform only since that would cause some problems...tried this but it didn't work on an IntelMac running Tiger and latest version of Audacity with LAME MP3. Next test will have to be on GNU/Linux machine.

ORIGINAL BLOG ENTRY:

I'm still exploring the Diigo Web Slides. One of the aspects of Diigo Web Slides that is captivating is the fact you can add audio narration, or music, to your Web Slides show. How cool is that?!?

You'll probably want to start Audacity recording at 44khz then go through your WebSlides and record your narration, save the recording as an MP3 then upload it.

Once you click on that button, you'll see this screen:

Your next step is record the audio for your Diigo WebSlide...then upload it. When you click the UPLOAD button above, you'll see this window pop up:

Unfortunately, my first recording had an error that generated this message:

Since my audio file was 268K, bit rate of 32, and 44khz, I'm not sure what the problem was or why it didn't work <sigh>.

I was unsuccessful every time, regardless of whether I created the file in Audacity or tried to load something from royalty free audio clips I have. Diigo, help!

Subscribe to the ThinkfinityTexas Blog.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools, TechTips, Thinkfinity

Are you using or exploring how to use Thinkfinity in Texas? If so, join the Texas Thinkfinity Diigo Group to share bookmarks, ideas for using Thinkfinity and more! Of course, it doesn't matter if you're in Texas since Thinkfinity is web-based, free, and an awesome collection of lesson plans, links and more.

NETS•T ALIGNMENT - Supports significant growth for: I.A., II.A., II.B., II.C., II.D., II.E., III.A., III.D.

The Verizon Thinkfinity program is a non–profit consortium of eight of the nation’s premier education organizations and the Verizon Foundation, each dedicated to providing the highest quality, standards-based, online educational resources for teachers and students nationwide. Thinkfinity content partners are: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Council on Economic Education, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Geographic Society, International Reading Association, National Council of Teachers of English, and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Thinkfinity's goal is to provide the best online educational resources and to help educators learn to use technology effectively within their instruction...Thinkfinity provides trainers and classroom teachers with both the training and resources necessary to successfully integrate online educational resources into the K–12 classroom. (Read Source Material)

and from E^2=Educating Educators:
"Thinkfinity delivers top-quality, standards-based, K-12 lesson plans, student materials, interactive tools ... and gives teachers, instructors and parents the tools they need to increase student performance today and create the lifelong learners of tomorrow."

Especially of interest is the free professional development provided to help educators make the most of the resources. The success of the program relies on a "train the trainer" model in which educators attend face-to-face sessions, and then facilitate workshops in their schools or districts.

Click the icon and/or link below to join and start sharing! Be sure to Introduce yourself!

Diigo Groups

And, if joining the TexasThinkfinity Group is just too much of a commitment, or whatever, why not subscribe via RSS to the bookmarks for Thinkfinity?

 Subscribe to the TexasThinkfinity Diigo Group.

Subscribe to the ThinkfinityTexas Blog.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: Education, MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools, Texas, Thinkfinity

Sitting in a Thinkfinity workshop, a participant by the name of June asked how people could keep track of bookmarks they wanted to share and use with staff. Karen Horn shared that the Thinkfinity staff (My Thinkfinity) was working on that, but it occurred to me that a better tool already exists. Why create another one?

Diigo can do the job. As I walked June and Renee--the two other great folks I was partnered with in the Thinkfinity training today--I decided to introduce them to Diigo Slides (), explained below:

Diigo's patent-pending WebSlides, http://slides.diigo.com, is an incredibly easy way to convert your bookmarks and feeds and present them as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format - complete with the full conten pages, links, comments, and ads. It enables a new way to easily create and share unique presentations based on web content and user annotations.

To create WebSlides, users simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks and add background music or voice narration. By clicking button, the list transforms into a slideshow, bringing Web pages and user comments to life. All you and your reader need is just a web browser.

To create WebSlides, users simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks and add background music or voice narration. By clicking Webslides button, the list transforms into a slideshow, bringing Web pages and user comments to life. All you and your reader need is just a web browser.
Source: How-To Guide/Web Slides

Working together, Renee created a Diigo account, then we set about touring Thinkfinity partner, ArtsEdge, and the team came up with this Diigo WebSlide. Here's one I made for fun:

Since I hadn't used WebSlides before, I decided to document our progress and blend Thinkfinity and Diigo and write a how-to article entitled, Slide Thinkfinity into the Curriculum with Diigo Slides.

Here's the lead from the article:

How can we organize those? Use Diigo, the social bookmarking and annotation tool, to help organize your bookmarks, and then use the slides feature of Diigo to present the web pages to students, colleagues and friends. This article addresses how to accomplish this and responds to these key questions:

1. What is Thinkfinity?

2. How can you use Diigo to store your favorite bookmarks, annotations (highlights and comments) for Thinkfinity?

3. How can you use the List and Slide features of Diigo to present Thinkfinity resources to others?

I hope the article is useful.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: Education, MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools

For fun, I pumped in all my writing (blog entries and my articles) about Diigo into Wordle to see what would come out...my apologies for inflicting these on you.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: Education, MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools

Image Source: Adapted from diigo.com with Tuxpaint without permission. 8->

Over the last month or so, I've been thrilled to have Diigo as a new social bookmarking tool. Yes, almost giddy. Having access to a tool that enables me to bookmark and highlight the web, add comments to it, save and send it via email has been just too much fun. However, it's not all rosy aromas and soft petals...I've discovered some thorns that I think need to be shorn. However, having used Simpy, Blinklist, Del.icio.us, and now, Diigo, I realize that I'm really searching for the perfect social bookmarking/annotation tool.

While we try to listen to users as much as possible, please understand that we do need strong reasons before changes are made (as is the case for any other product development), otherwise, the product can get unwieldy, with everyone having different requests and ideas about how things should be done. In fact, we have heated internal debates all the time about what to do.

Also, some of my questions are for the purpose of understanding the scenarios better. So when I say I need some "enligthening", I do mean so.
Source: Wade Ren, Diigo

I love that Wade shares this insight into Diigo development...and I'm amused that I'm starting to get heated about improving Diigo...it is a measure of how much a useful tool it is and how I see it being improved. This is the art of perfection, adding a little and taking some away.

But what would such a perfect tool have? Part of my conversation with Wade Ren at Diigo--and I applaud his willingness to engage in conversation, even though I may be pushing ideas he considers unworthy of Diigo--includes the following entries. I'm posting them here...a part of me is reluctant to ask for change for Diigo. Yet, when I look at the proposed changes for Diigo, I realize that there are various competing visions for this popular social bookmarking tool. The first vision is extraordinary and has brought Diigo forward. It is, of course, Wade's vision of Diigo. And I wouldn't dream of criticizing that vision for Diigo, although I'm wondering now if that vision is sufficient. You see, I think the vision represented by my posts is more representative of what Diigo users want and need. While Wade's vision was powerful and got us to this point, if Diigo wants to make it further, maybe they need to listen even more to their users rather than "cherry-pick" the suggestions that agree with their perspective, their vision.

I could be completely wrong about that <smile>. The conversation, of which only a portion is quoted here, appears at Diigo.

I begin with Clif Mims recommendations regarding Diigo. Clif writes:

Now, because Miguel asked, here are my suggestions for making Diigo more useful in educational settings.

1. Please consider removing the ads from the accounts of those that are using Diigo for educational purposes. Wetpaint.com has recently begun removing ads from wikis being used for education. Requests are made via email at Wetpaint.

2. Consider providing schools the option of using Diigo over the Internet or on a local intranet as I predict many districts would prefer the latter.

3. Review any remaining unaddressed suggestions on Miguel's other discussion similar to this one.

To these points, I added the following:

Clif, I have to echo your suggestions. Item #1 was particularly obvious when sharing with folks how to use Diigo...and, in spite of Emily's excellent video, Diigo WAS overwhelming for brand new users of social bookmarking tools. Having taught Delicious, the differences were startling between the list of things a new Diigo user had to do compared to a new Delicious user. After working with a class of 20 folks, I honestly wished I'd shown them Delicious.

The most annoying aspect of Diigo--and I say this in the kindest way with the understanding I enjoy Diigo--for new users is NOT being able to easily SAVE and SEND new bookmarks to other Diigo users who are not part of a contact list. When I first brought this up, I thought it was just me, but sharing is what these folks want to do...thinking about creating a contact list first, adding everyone you possibly could to it...well that was just too many steps and clicks.

The other problem I encountered was wanting to sign folks up for a Diigo group using their brand new Diigo username. Maybe I'm blind, but I couldn't see how to do it. Imagine a classroom setting where folks are calling out there username and the facilitator can't quickly add folks to a group (like you can in YahooGroups, for example, all at once).

Instead, each user--again, not good in a class of newbies--had to type in the convuluted http://groups.diigo.com/groups/groupname and join the group themselves.

Another item is the Messages...it takes too many clicks to leave a conversation. I bet that many Diigo users are accumulating over 50 conversations by now (at least, I was until I started leaving them...imagine, that's several hundred clicks to leave a conversation).

Consider again the suggestion to add a quick checkbox and REMOVE from Conversation option on the page that lists all conversations (Inbox).

I know Diigo folks are busy right now, so I'm bringing these items up to keep them on the radar.

I make the following points with screenshots...

Ok, here we are...I've created a new group for my class. I'm unable to invite folks that are in Diigo--that is, that have registered accounts in Diigo--unless I know their email. None of the options below enable me to add Diigo users EXCEPT through email or by FIRST adding them to my addressbook.

However, if I'm in the same room with people, all of whom just registered for Diigo accounts, we're not able to share those Diigo usernames. Instead, I have to know their email address. This is illustrated below:

Now, why would I want to do this? Simple. I know my Diigo usernames but not email addresses. In fact, Twitter, Delicious, other similar tools do not require me to know email addresses but rather, the username. Like many others, I have ONE common username that I use from system to system...but multiple emails that I wouldn't expect anyone to know.

So, now, I'm at a stopping point. Why? I have to go back and INVITE people to join me on Diigo. This is illustrated here:

With Del.icio.us, all I have to do is type in "for:mguhlin" and MGuhlin gets the message. The anti-spam policy is just that...a policy. I advise changing it so that people can bypass this whole cumbersome contact list/addressbook/invite via email process. (smile). The system on Diigo is getting in the way of sharing, of being social.

SAVE AND SEND

Now, let's take the SAVE and SEND New Bookmarks to other Diigo users. I may actually know people that I haven't added to my pre-built contact list.

Now, I want to send this link (image above) to my wife. She's a brand new Diigo user who has no one in her addressbook, hasn't taken the time to build an addressbook on Diigo and doesn't want to spam folks in her Gmail account. But, I can't...

All I can do is type in her email address, but I can't SHARE the link with her in any way.

Delicious has come up with a solution for this, though. They created a "holding cell" for bookmarks. This is called "Links for You." The links go into that area, but if you want them, you have to add them.

If you're worried about liability, Wade, how about just making this an option for users? Check here to choose whether you want to block receipt of links for you from strangers?

Thanks for reading.

I suppose I am getting carried away. I'd hate to turn into Diigo's #1 Psychotic Fan.

;->

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools

Today has been an exciting day, as over 22% of visitors to this blog and my Share More! wiki went to read my article on Diigo, the social bookmarking and annotation tool. So, it was some excitement that I picked up a copy of a Journal of Research on Technology in Education (Fall, 2004) and found some research (John Lee and Brendan Calandra) that asked a related question:

Can embedded annotations help high school students perform problem-solving tasks using a web-based historical document?

Obviously, writing notes in a book can be powerful for us individually. But add social annotation of a web-based document, and we go to a different level of conversation and understanding.

Here are my take-aways from this particular study:

1. The instructional use of emerging technologies such as the Web represents a unique opportuity to alter dramatically the character of social studies instruction.
2. The use of online resources in social studies and history classrooms has to date been limited.
3. Content that is unfamiliar or organized in an unfamiliar fashion will be learned poorly unless the individual is provided with or develops concepts or organizing principles that aid the acquisition process [Aside: Show everyone how to use Diigo and you have a great tool to get that job done!]
4. Help devices such as scaffolding resources must initially assist students with their learning activity (i.e. student-content interaction).
5. Types of scaffolding that can be included in open learning environments include:
   a) conceptual scaffolding that guides a learner in what content to consider;
   b) metacognitive scaffolding that guides a learner in how to think during learning;
   c) procedural scaffolding that guides a learner in how to utilize available features of an environment; and
   d) strategic scaffolding that guides a learner in how to analyze and approach given learning task or problem.
6. Designers need to ground the design of digital learning environments in theory and practice...if not, teachers can end up having to develop over-structured activities that may limit students' interaction with those digital resources.
7. Conceptual scaffolding devices in the form of textual annotations were developed for each concept to asist users by providing context and schema related to the material at hand.
8. Students' responses--result of the findings--supported the contention that the annotations would make a difference in the depth of student responses. Students who had access to annotations would respond to the prompts in the scenario with more depth.
9. The complexity of interactions that resulted from students' uses of the annotations should prompt instructional Web designers to consider carefully how they present annotational content. Pedagogical design intentions need to be transparent.
10. Teachers need to be provided information on how Web-based annotational content might function when uses in instructional settings. If the annotations need additional contextualization, teachers need to provide that context.
11. Teachers need to consider how ancillary content raised in annotations will function in their classrooms. Annotations can aid teachers in their efforts to help students understand related content, but only after careful consideration of the ways in which these annotations actually function.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: Books_Research, Education, MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools

The deadline for TCEA's TECHEDGE magazine fast approaches, so I took some time to write two articles for publication:

1. Diigo the Web for Education: From TeleGatherer to TelePlanter with Diigo - With the advent of Web 2.0, hundreds of tools are available. But you only need one to get started annotating and sharing resources you find on the Web. As Dr. Judi Harris shared long ago (http://tinyurl.com/5j5jnh), gathering web-based resources is part of our “hunting and gathering” stage of development.
   
   New web tools allow you to do MORE than just gather great resources; they allow you to explain why they are great, put virtual post-its on them, and then share that care package of great resource links with your comments with your audience of choice.
   
   
2. Writing the Ed-Tech List Article - The two top question writers hear often include, “Where do you get your ideas for articles?” and “How do you have time to write?” For example, at a recent gathering of technology directors, someone walked up to me and asked, “How did you take notes and format them so quickly on the web?” These simple questions are the foundations of new articles that allow me list the qualities of a wiki. For example, such an article would immediately mention that 1) Make your web site a wiki so you can edit and add to while online anywhere without special software (like Dreamweaver or Frontpage); 2) Allows other people to add content so that more than one person can maintain the content; and 3) Choose the wiki you need based on your criteria.
   
   With those 3 points, an educational technology list article about wikis in education is easy to write. Charles Main shared the idea of a list article in The Handbook for Magazine Writing. He shared that the list article is designed to solve problems, present information and otherwise help the reader. This makes it perfect for education technologists to use to share their stories of success. I hope you’ll follow the suggestions in this article and submit your own to TechEdge.

I'm hoping the second article is accepted for publication. It summarizes my approach to writing and teaching for the last few years.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: Education, MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools, Texas, Writing

Clif Mims asks a great question:

We're hosting an educational conference this weekend (http://pidt.memphis.edu) and I'm going to be showing off the merits of Diigo. I'm hoping to recruit many new users. I'm wanting to set up an RSS feed(s) for the two tags we're using specifically with this conference. The tags are pidt and pidt2008. I tagged a couple of my bookmarks with these tags a few days ago but they are not showing up when I search all of Diigo or in the RSS I thought I could use for them. See http://pidt.wetpaint.com/page/RSS+Feeds to see the feeds I'm trying to use. Feel free to edit the wiki or reply here...I'm still having problems getting an RSS feed(s) for the tags we're going to use at the conference. I've already bookmarked a few of my own bookmarks with them. The 2 tags we're using are "pidt" and "pidt2008". Is there a way to pull an RSS feed of all the bookmarks that are tagged with these bookmarks from all Diigo users?

What a great question. At first, I thought this would surely be built into Diigo but couldn't find it. Then, I checked Delicious to no avail. Admittedly, my searches occurred early in the morning right before I had to get going for breakfast, etc. Some of ideas that popped into my head included:

1. Ideally, you should be able to run a search on Diigo and then get an RSS feed of the results. http://www.diigo.com/search?what=pidt2008
2. Unfortunately, there's no RSS feed for the results. Of course, Delicious doesn't have this either. RSS feeds only show up when you get your own tags. Look in the top right corner. http://www.diigo.com/user/clifsnotes/pidt2008 Diigo and Delicious seem to work in the same way in regards to linkrolls (i just looked).
3. So, another possibility is to do a Google search on pidt2008 and diigo and save that search as an RSS feed. http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&client=news&q=pidt2008&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
4. Unfortunately, that's not perfect. Another approach might be to use Hitchhikr.com. Register yourself, add "pidt2008" as the conference tag. Then get the RSS feed for that tag from Hitchhikr. http://hitchhikr.com

I felt terrible but knew that someone would come through. Wade Ren (Diigo CEO) shared:

Your bookmarks are here: http://www.diigo.com/tag/pidt2008+PIDT?tab=153
but the rss on that page appears broken. will have that fixed asap. also, will add rss feed to this page
http://search.diigo.com/search?adSScope=all&what=pidt+pidt2008

How neat is that? Prompt response! So, if you want to find out about items tagged "edustreams"--educational uStream.tv, Elluminate sessions, etc for education--just type in the following:

http://www.diigo.com/tag/edustreams?tab=153

and (provided you're not logged into Diigo), Close the ad box in the top right corner of the screen and the RSS button will be underneath it. The code looks like this:

http://www.diigo.com/rss/tag/edustreams

Just change the bold word in the two links immediately above to whatever tag you want to use and you're set. Can Delicious do that? Love to know how.

Pretty nifty!

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools

A few days ago, I noticed that Diigo was down for a bit under 20 minutes. Was Diigo buckling under the pressure of global educators? No...the truth is far more horrible.

At the time, I had no idea that an earthquake in China measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale had hit. I now see reports of over 15,000 dead, complete destruction and heroic rescues and volunteer efforts. Though I knew Maggie and Wade at Diigo.com were of Chinese descent, I had no idea that Diigo was partly housed in China, not 90 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake.

Wow.

Maggie writes in the Diigo blog:

The past few days have not been easy for me, as I have been traveling on the road, and just have a chance to sit down and write this blog post now. Our prayers are with all the people impacted by this tragedy. We’re doing Diigo because we thought we could make some difference to the world of internet users… Given the severity of this Sichuan earthquake, and at time like this, one realizes how precious our life is and what our loved ones, friends, and families mean to us. We are sharing our story, and doing what we can as individuals, and as a company. We’d also like to appeal and urge people to consider donating & helping the needy.

My prayers are with you and your's.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools

It would be great to have embed code that I could use to advertise for a particular group on my blog. For example, I want more people to sign up for the TexasEdTechNews group, but aside from putting a link up, I'd like to have something that enables other people to click and connect.
Source: Miguel Guhlin's Request on Diigo Improvement Suggestions conversation

Sheryl A. McCoy (n2teaching) was kind enough to point out the word I was looking for--badge. Since I have a few groups going in Diigo that I'd like to invite folks to join, I asked via the Diigo Improvement Suggestions conversation HOW TO get a badge or button that I could add to my blog or wiki sidebar so that people could sign up to share bookmarks, annotations and comments about a particular topic.

Some of my groups include:

• CTOnetwork - This group is primarily for Chief Technology Officers and Technology Directors everywhere to share material relevant to one another.
• Texas EdTechNews - Keeping up with all the exciting things in Texas, as well as EdTech in Texas, is a lot of fun. I often want to share that with a wider audience of folks, but have to depend on listservs through professional organizations to accomplish that. Since I'd rather NOT do that, I'm inviting Texas educators to jump in and join this group.
• EduStreams - A quick way to archive all the great uStream.tv broadcasts of edublogger presentations.
• AsusEee in Education - A place to share Asus Eee related links.

Here's how Wade Ren (Diigo CEO) suggested I access the badge, or "group widget:"

group widget is already available. go to "edit my membership" on the group you manage, and click the group widget tab.

Here's what it looks like (right click images to view at full-size) to follow those instructions:

and paste it into the appropriate place:

so that it will look like this (although it's a bit big for my sidebar):

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools, TechTips

Maggie Tsai, who works for Diigo.com, recently shared the following:

We had a blast meeting with David LaPlante, chairman of the State of Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology and CEO of Twelve Horses and his crew, Mike Henderson, Earl Spriggs & Leilani Schweitzer. Twelve Horses is a full-service relationship marketing and messaging company specializing in designing interactive communication solutions. It’s great knowing that many workgroups and companies are discovering and finding Diigo to be quite useful for both personal productivity and effective collaborative research… reasons that inspire us to create Diigo in the very first place. Besides “What is / Why Diigo”, we also chatted about “Why Reno / Tahoe”

To find out the inside scoop, be sure to check out our interview and podcast http://tinyurl.com/6h46tz

Listen to Podcast 

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools

How would you improve Diigo? Although the conversation on Diigo Improvements has been great, I'm not sure the Diigo folks are moving fast enough!! <smile>. So, to help them along, I've throw together a list of the improvements folks have mentioned here and put them in a wiki so that all of us can edit/improve/add to them.

Find that at http://mguhlin.wikispaces.com/diigo

Remember, if you contribute just one improvement, you make a significant contribution for the larger community. The more of us that sign on for change, the more I hope the Diigo folks will be responsive and prioritize improvements aligned to the Diigo Community's needs.

Posted by Miguel Guhlin at | +Del.icio.us |
Categories: MGuhlin.net, SocialBookmarkingTools

Digital is a word that often gets in the way: Strive first and always for human excellence and towards our higher individual and collective purposes. Excellence is a matter of character.
Source: WryThings' Path Towards Excellence

I fundamentally disagree with this approach. We need to strive towards digitally-enhanced human excellence from the beginning, not strive first and always for human excellence THEN consider something else. Although sometimes it's helpful to start with traditional tools--like Emily's approach to bookmarking in the video below, moving us from traditional bookmarks to "social bookmarking" online--when designing things from scratch, you have to start with technology first. Otherwise, it never happens.

Thanks to this excellent video by Emily Barney (shared by Maggie Tsai from Diigo, and WryThings), you can now use this video--hosted on YouTube--to introduce social bookmarking with Diigo to others. (BTW, if YouTube is blocked, I'm keeping a copy here in MP4 format (28 megs)) you can view).

This one is definitely going into the archive to share with district staff...maybe even Doug Johnson (Blue Skunk Blog) might review this video and share whether he thinks if it's as straightforward as CommonCraft.com?