Dear Diary,
I was at School’s Attuned Training today. We were examining ordering systems. One of the activities was quite embarrassing! We needed to visualize our clothes closets. Then, we had to organize ourselves into a continuum by conversing with others in line and arranging ourselves from the messiest closet to the most organized. Well, I was near the ‘neat’ end. The instructor, my principal, (someone who knew me too well), asked me to share how my closet was organized.
I said, “It’s a large walk-in closet. The closet is changed seasonally and off-season clothing is packed into bins and put in the basement. Clothes are arranged by type, dresses, skirts, pants, tops and then each type is arranged by colour according to the colour spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, white. Shoes are on racks underneath the tops and skirts and handbags, scarves, etc. are in bins on the top shelf.” As I’m speaking people are rapidly leaving my side and moving on down the line. By the time I finished describing how there are certain types of hangers for certain items I was alone at the neat end. There was a gap of several meters and then the line began again. I didn’t realize I was such a freak!
I’ll confess to being a compulsive sorter and organizer. Just like earlier organizational tools, the staple, the paper clip, post-it notes, coloured file folders, tabs, and graphic organizers, I’m discovering that social bookmarking tools are fantastic on-line friends!
Exploring and learning about Social Bookmarking tools!
Dear Diary,
I need to explore social bookmarking tools for my course. I like diigo and refworks but I don’t think I use them to their full potential. What is it I’m missing?
Dear Diary,
The light bulb is beginning to flicker on. I realize that when I use a social bookmarking tool instead of my favourites I can access my bookmarks from any computer in the world.
I decided to stick with refworks for bookmarking and organizing journal articles as well as generating citations and bibliographies as I found it straightforward and it was the tool that the university provided. I
chose diigo over evernote as evernote is blocked by my school board filters and diigo isn’t. This time I decided to focus on diigo.
Dear Diary,
I don’t begin to think that I have a firm understanding of diigo. I need to go back to the beginning. It’s funny, in the summer I used diigo for research. I found articles, websites and blogs, saved them, tagged them, highlighted items or captured a page and I was thrilled with this new tool. Now, I feel like I must have had tunnel vision as I didn’t go beyond the research stage. Everywhere I look I see words like share, network, community and follow. How does all of this work?
Crane (2009) states “another problem with this method of bookmarking (favorites) was that you couldn’t easily share your bookmarks with other people and other people couldn’t share theirs with you” (p.151). I went back and reread Richardson’s (2010) chapter on social bookmarking and focused on the sharing part of this tool. Then I went beyond the research phase and watched diigo’s introductory videos on "Sharing: building a personal network" and another on ‘Collaboration: Create a group knowledge repository'
Dear Diary,
I think I’m beginning to get it! I can use diigo to bookmark sites I find. I've figured out how to tag them, highlight items and add sticky notes. I can capture a page or a section of a page. Now I need to think about how I would share this knowledge. How do I build a personal network or a group knowledge repository? I need to explore these features as I think about how to use social bookmarking in my personal and professional life.
The best cinnamon knots: bookmarking tools in my personal life!
While I like to be organized, I don’t spend a great deal of personal time on the internet and wasn’t really sure if there was a reason to use social bookmarking in my personal life. As I described this assignment to some family members, their eyes lit up. I showed them technorati.com and they were sold. My partner follows all of his favorite sports teams and icons and now he has the latest gossip for his tailgate meeting the next morning. My sister has simply gone crazy. She discovered that searching entertainment tags and the top 100 blogs, gives her some of the latest information from sites like tmz.com and just jared and she can easily share it all on facebook. They are the social butterflies of the family. This kind of information and chatter doesn't interest me. I wasn’t quite sure where to begin.
Whether it’s just my perception or not, delicious seems more social in the sense of connecting friends and personal interests. Since I’m in love with Diigo in my professional life, I decided to switch and explore delicious a bit more using a couple of my personal affinities as my guide: cooking and gardening.
I must admit to being fairly negative about this exploration. I simply didn’t see it as something I would use, or something that would be useful to me. For each interest, I generated a few tags that I thought might be useful. I decided to browse tags and started with ‘food’.
Overwhelming! There were 2,404,028 bookmarks with this tag. Instead of using another of my food tags, I went with one of the eleven related tags suggested on the site, ‘sweets’. Now I’m down to 4,255 bookmarks. I was disappointed that no further tag suggestions were provided. I added my own ‘cinnamon’. At last, I’m down to 22 bookmarks and I can eliminate 17 that are cookies, breads, and cakes. So I have 5 cinnamon roll recipes. I try to open one that has a straightforward title ‘Cinnamon Roll Recipes’ and sixty-three people have bookmarked it but as you can see this cinnamon bun recipe page cannot be found. I’m thinking, “See? This is a waste of my time and surfing through the food network would yield me better results. I click on the one above. Only seventeen have bookmarked it and I think it will be another loser but success!! Not only do I have a decent recipe but I have found a baking blog with yummy recipes and many, many mouth-watering pictures. I subscribe to this blog Pip in the city and slowly I’m beginning to think I might be getting it. I need to test it out some more.
Skunks are tearing up our front yard looking for grubs. I’m looking for some environmentally friendly advice that can help with this problem, other than digging the pests out. The tag ‘gardening’ produced 251613 results, not nearly as many as I was hoping for. The suggested related links had nothing to do with garden problems so I added the second term grubs. I’m down to 22 and at a glance can see that this is not a popular topic as most have been bookmarked only once or twice. The results can be categorized quite easily into grub identification, pesticides, and environmentally friendly solutions. I already know about nematodes so will take a look at my local garden centre for a product with the bacteria bacillus popilliae as recommended by commercial link while another was a completely useless forum. I'm beginning to see the benefit of searching by tags, following people with similar tags and interests and love the idea that I can find interesting blogs through these connections. To stay on top of everything Richardson (2010) points out we can use RSS feeds" (p. 90). de Ramirez (2009) adds, “diigo also serves as an RSS feed reader...Users can manage subscriptions and organize them using key terms and phrases to facilitate research and sharing.. access the most recent saves, headlines and popular websites"(p.125).
Diggin’ Diigo: Social bookmarking tools in my professional life!
Dear Diary,
I adore the tool Diigo. I can use it as I would all of the tools I gather around me as I read a hard copy of an article. I've figured out bookmarking, highlighting, adding a comment or note and capturing a section of a page or site. While I tag what I bookmark I need to start thinking about what Richardson (2010) describes as "socially negotiated categorization". I need to start thinking about folksonomy and what he suggests is the "added potential of seeing how others might interpret or use resources that we share” (p.91). Since I have some competency with the research features of diigo, what kind of network, group or community will be of use to me as a professional and as the library media specialist in a technologically backward environment?
Harris (2009) views social bookmarking as a “great tool for librarians to gather, organize, and disseminate the best of the Net” (p. 14). Since I feel I have some competency with the research element and my clientele are very young, I decided to focus first on my colleagues. One of my areas of interest is social justice. At work we have a committee, The Future We Want, that is responsible for promoting inclusion and acceptance. Since a great number of my bookmarks are related to social justice I decided to focus on this group. Within diigo there is a groups tab. I've joined several education focused groups, diigo community, classroom 2.0, Literacy with ICT and social bookmark websites. I follow one personal group, All Things Food, and formed my own 'The Future We Want' group. As with most of my bookmarks, I've marked it private for now. I think this is a case of I need to feel a bit more confident before I mark things public. The chair of the committee has joined and I'll be inviting all of the other committee members just before our meeting this Wednesday, when I'll have time within the agenda to show diigo and some of the items bookmarked. I've prepared several bookmarks to demonstrate highlighting and adding a note. Once staff are interested, I'm hoping to make the group public and further build our network. Along with joining and forming a group, I've started to build my network and now follow a few bloggers, journalists and educators who focus on social justice. I'm finding it interesting and realize that I need to take some time to look at who they follow and continue to build this network.
Dear Diary,
I'm excited at the prospect of building a diigo network with my colleagues. What about my students? Most of what I read refers to highschool-aged groups. Is there any use for diigo with younger students?
Harris (2009) suggests that "like special librarians who gather and organize resources for business customers, we sometimes need to gather information to share with school staff or younger children," (p. 14).
Yes, I could provide resources to teachers via diigo. While I understand this use, for the last few years we've been using pathfinders built on wikis with both staff and students. Since I can highlight, annotate and share with diigo, I'm wondering if I should be changing or adding diigo to our pathfinders?
Crane (2009) provides clear descriptions of classroom applications, e.g. class bookmarks, using the annotating feature to describe hidden messages in advertisements, diigo class group study notes, (p.153). Many of these suggestions have the teacher doing the searching, bookmarking, and annotating. I think in a kindergarten to grade five setting it is my job to model, both for the teachers and the students. I also think we need to make the link between what we do with a hard copy and how we can do the same things using diigo, e.g. if grade twos are generating a list of keywords to use while exploring e-library for a heritage project a link can be made between generating keywords to generating tags as we look at a family tree blog bookmarked on diigo. If a grade five class are reading and discussing an article about bullying the article could be bookmarked in a diigo class group and students could have a chance to comment on the article and classmates views.
de Ramirez (2010) relates Larry Ferlazzo's views on using social bookmarking with English language learners. Not only do they relate basic bookmarking and commentary to TESOL standards, they review sites, social bookmarking etiquette and suggest uses for different age brackets. They suggest that for grades K-5 "social bookmarking sites can be used with elementary aged students to collect class Web sites and to share them with caregivers at home. Teachers can find appropriate and useful Web sites and collect them on a Diigo page, for example, for students to access and use for research, homework and group projects. They can create a class group to house and organize the bookmarks that the class finds useful throughout the year" (p.131). If I consider the expectations in OSLA's Information Studies document, as early as Kindergarten we ask students to ask questions, sort and classify objects, and contribute their ideas. All of these skills will make them capable diigo users.
Dear Diary,
Each time I sign in to diigo I discover something new. I'm gradually realizing the benefit of networking! I can follow people with similar interests or better yet, ones that look at things from a different point of view. I can search through their tags. I can search through who they follow and find others that would be a benefit to my network. I can form a professional learning community with colleagues using diigo!
Do I have a handle on social bookmarking? Absolutely not. Richardson (2010) reminds us that “with more than 10 billion pages of information on the Web already and millions more being added each year, it’s no wonder people are starting to feel overwhelmed by the Internet,” (p 89). As we become more competent at tagging, annotating and networking, social bookmarks are going to become invaluable. Diigo explains it the best. Here's why we should be using diigo as a teacher, a student and in the classroom: "Diigo enables collaborative research. You can easily share your findings, complete with your highlights and sticky notes, with friends and collleagues. A project team, a class, or a club can create a group on Diigo to pool relevant resources, findings and thoughts together" Diigo (2010).
References
References
Crane, B. E. (2009). Using web 2.0 tools in the K-12 classroom. New York, NY: Neal
Schuman Publishers.
de Ramirez, L. L. (2010). Empower English language learners with tools from the web. Thousand Oakes, CA: Corwin.
Diigo. http://www.diigo.com/learn_more
Harris, C. (2009). What’s next for social bookmarking? School Library Journal, 55(2), 14 -15.
Ontario School Library Association. (1998). Information studies: Kindergarten - grade twelve.
http://www.accessola.com/data/6/rec_docs/113_Information_Studies.pdf Retrieved Oct. 9, 2010.
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oakes, CA: Corwin.
Schools Attuned. http://www.schoolsattuned.org/
Stearns, J. (2010). Serendipitous Learning with Social Bookmarking. CSLA Journal, 34(1), 18-19.
Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking. Retrieved Oct. 7, 2010.
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