Blog Posts, Articles, and Reports To Read: May 2011

• “Desire2Learn Product Updates“
• “The best bookmarking tools right now“
• “10 Ways to Use NYTimes.com for Research“
• “Online Education for Instructional Designers: Picking the Right Program“
• “A-Z Web Tools“
• “Landing Online Teaching Jobs“
• “Search Engines List by Types of Searches“
• “The Psychology of Color in Web Design“
• “HTML E-Mail: Text Font Readability Study“
• “12 Things to Do After You’ve Written a New Blog Post“

Video: “Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember!”

Video: “Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember!“

Resources for Using Diigo

Websites:

• Diigo
• Diigo V4 Help
• Diigo V4 Help:  Videos & Tutorials
• Diigo on Twitter
• Diigo Toolbar
• Diigo Blog
• Google Notebook:  Diigo Tutorials

Presentations:

• “Social Bookmarking Using Diigo“
• “Social Bookmarking for Educators with Diigo“
• “Diigo: Secrets of a Power User (NECC09)“

Videos (in addition to those in Diigo V4 Help):

• “Diigo Demo- Sharing and Collaborating“
• “Diigo Demo- Annotations“
• “Diigo Demo- Bookmarking“
• “Diigo Demo- Website“
• “Diigo Demo“
• “Diigo- very quick run through“
• “Diigo Registration“
• “A Guide to Annotating using Diigo“
• “Using Diigo and the Diigolet Tool for Research Purposes“
• “Using Diigo.“
• “Post Bookmarks to Diigo“
• “Diigo-Network“
• “Diigo Tutorial (groups)“
• “Diigo in the Classroom“
• “Diigo in the classroom“

Moving from Delicious to Diigo

I’ve moved my bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo, which I’ll probably start using this summer for my second-semester freshman composition classes.  I’ve been requiring my students to create accounts on Delicious to bookmark sites they find and use for class.  This last semester, we had problems because new users are required to create new Yahoo! accounts or use existing ones.  Students who used existing accounts had trouble logging on again later.

Diigo appears to have all of the functions Delicious does and more, including

• groups
• highlighting and comments on webpages
• educational accounts
• messages
• blogs

Because of the EasyBlog feature, I can use Diigo instead of both Delicious and Blogger for my classes.  (I have my students use blogs as research journals.)  With the group feature, I won’t have to put links to students’ blogs and bookmarking accounts on the class wiki.

Delicious Is Getting Stale

For the last couple of years, I’ve had my second-semester freshman composition students use Delicious to bookmark sites they find and use in their research.  This semester, though, students who tried to use existing Yahoo! accounts for Delicious have had trouble when they tried to log in again, and the use of the Yahoo! logins had made the registration process longer and more difficult.

I’m thinking of using Diigo instead.  I’ve opened an account, and I found this video on YouTube:

I’d appreciate any information about using Diigo for college classes.

My 2000th Bookmark

Today I created my 2000th bookmark in my Delicious account:

• Panabee
  Panabee is a faster way to search and compare sites. See results from Google, Bing, Twitter, Amazon, Wikipedia, and others with one click. View sites side-by-side.
  (tags: comparison metacrawler research)

It was included in an earlier post today with other bookmarks I created today.

Presentation: “Integrating Social Networking & Web 2.0 Applications into eLearning”

Presentation:  “Integrating Social Networking & Web 2.0 Applications into eLearning“

Research Journal Assignment #2

Learn about Social Bookmarking:

Use any or all of the following resources to learn about social bookmarking in general and Delicious in particular:

• Video:  “Social Bookmarking in Plain English“
• Webpage:  “Help on Delicious“
• Webpage:  “What’s New on Delicious“
• Video:  “Social Bookmarking – Delicious Part One“
• Video:  “Social Bookmarking – Delicious Part Two“
• Video:  “How to Use Delicious – Basic function“
• Article:  “7 Things You Should Know about Social Bookmarking“
• Presentation:  “Instructional Uses of Social Bookmarking” (with voice)

Create a Delicious Account:

Register for a social bookmarking account with Delicious. Please make sure that your username includes your first and/or last name, so I can identify your account.

Start bookmarking websites you want to use for class. These can be related to your topic or to research in general. Be sure you tag your bookmarks so you can find them again.

Feel free to explore my bookmarks and save any that you find interesting.

Post in Your Blog:

Post three times  in your blog (research journal), using the numbers, letters, and phrases in bold as the titles of your respective posts:

RJA #2a: Possible Topics–Brainstorm a list of topics you’re interested in using for your research project this semester.  Identify which topic you have selected, keeping in mind the following guidelines:

• Select a topic that interests you because you’ll be reading, researching, and writing about it all semester.
• Select a topic that is academic or scholarly (i.e., on that would be covered in a college class probably in the arts, sciences, or social sciences) and on which reasonable and knowledgeable people disagree.
• Select a topic that you can cover adequately in 3,600 words.
• Select a topic for which you can find the required sources (see the syllabus).
• Select a topic with which you are not already too familiar.
• Select a topic that has not been used too much.

RJA #2b: Research Topic–Write three paragraphs about the topic you’ve selected: (1) identify your topic and explain why you chose it, (2) discuss what you already know about your topic, and (3) discuss what you don’t know and want to learn about the topic. Each paragraph should be at least several sentences long. Grammar and spelling count!

RJA #2c: Delicious Account–Create a link to your Delicious account.  For help on creating a link on your blog, watch this video.

Use the department and course number (ENG 1020 or ENG 122) and other appropriate tags (”Labels” on Blogger) for each of the three posts.

My Twines

I joined Twine more than a year ago, but I didn’t get around to exploring it until this week.  I’ve joined the following twines, “interest networks”:

• 2.0 World
• Educational Technology
• learning_with_web2.0
• Online Education
• Search
• Search and Discovery
• Social Media
• Star Trek
• Twitter Guide

I subscribed to RSS feeds for all of them and tried out the bookmarklet, which doesn’t seem to allow the user to specify which twine to add the item to.

I can see how Twine could be useful for my second-semester composition students.  They could find or create twines related to their research topics.

Wordle: My Delicious Tags 3-09

Wordle: My Delicious Tags 3-09