For a collaborative blog, I'd suggest either a Blogger or Wordpress blog. Though Blogger is getting tangled up with Google+, for students with Gmail accounts already, the single log-in is advantageous. You could be the blog owner, and students could be contributors (co-authors), or, to ease them in, they could have only commenting privileges that you could moderate. However, screening comments in advance can impede interactions and responses among contributors, especially if you're not monitoring the blog 24/7.
I believe students would have to have Diigo installed on their computers to facilitate cooperative bookmarking of Internet sites. You'd probably want to set up (a) Diigo group(s) for them, with recommended tags. For example, I own a Weblogging in Kumamoto (WinK) group, and have an RSS feed for bookmarks tagged "wink_students" in the sidebar on a writing course blog. However, students don't do the bookmarking for that; other teachers and I do. You and other group members can share annotations and highlights publicly or privately (with particular groups).
With a Diigo group, and student invitees, discussion forums also will be available. So course blogs might be unnecessary, if you go the Diigo route. Carefully threaded discussion posts may be better than flat comment threads on target blog posts. (I'm not sure yet, but Blogger may have begun threading replies to particular comments.)
I hope this responds satisfactorily to most if not all of your recent inquiries. If not, please let me know in (a) comment(s) on this post.
Showing posts with label bookmarking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bookmarking. Show all posts
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Sunday, February 03, 2013
Google Search for "online teaching"
A Google Search this morning (online teaching), turned up a couple of interesting hits. That is, they were interesting enough for me to review and then tag them in Diigo, a social bookmarking system that I use for micro-blogging instead of Twitter. I've replicated the two tagged entries below.
The first, Starter.co.nz, I thought may be of interest to teachers of young learners, who can browse previews of available resources, and decide whether such a subscription service would be of value to them or their schools. So I posted it to the Classroom 2.0 group, as I was adding it to my list of Educational Technology items.
The second, from the Designing for Learning website, has an intended audience of university faculty members new to online teaching, or interested in imporving their online teaching practices. So I decided to post it to the Moodle4Teachers group, as well as two others to which I belong, and cross-listed in both my Educational Technology and my Faculty Development lists.
When I returned again to the Google Search page, I noticed Google also had spotted "49 [other] items in ... [my] Diigo Library." Please feel free to check them out, too, and if you have any favorites or hot picks of your own, please share them in return.
The first, Starter.co.nz, I thought may be of interest to teachers of young learners, who can browse previews of available resources, and decide whether such a subscription service would be of value to them or their schools. So I posted it to the Classroom 2.0 group, as I was adding it to my list of Educational Technology items.
A follow-on to the no longer active http://www.teachingonline.org/ site, "starters.co.nz is a web-based subscription resource for schools featuring over 1600 quality pdf, ready-to-use lesson plans including digital resources such as videos and websites that enhance and add depth to the lessons. / Our lessons are based on and cover all areas of the New Zealand Curriculum and are grouped for Yrs 1–4 and Yrs 4–9+. / starters is particularly useful for printing out easy-to-follow quality lessons for relieving teachers" (deck, 2013.02.03).
The second, from the Designing for Learning website, has an intended audience of university faculty members new to online teaching, or interested in imporving their online teaching practices. So I decided to post it to the Moodle4Teachers group, as well as two others to which I belong, and cross-listed in both my Educational Technology and my Faculty Development lists.
On this page, Boettcher explains, "ten best practices for anyone just getting started in the online environment. Research and experience suggest that these practices contribute to an effective, efficient and satisfying teaching and learning experience for both faculty and students" (para. 2, retrieved 2012.02.03 ["Minor revisions May 2011"]).
When I returned again to the Google Search page, I noticed Google also had spotted "49 [other] items in ... [my] Diigo Library." Please feel free to check them out, too, and if you have any favorites or hot picks of your own, please share them in return.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Networked Student - YouTube (2008.11.26)
Networked Student - YouTube: Uploaded by Wendy Drexler on Nov 26, 2008
The Networked Student (Drexler, 2008)
"The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler's high school students."
(YouTube description, link added)
The Networked Student (Drexler, 2008)
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Another century post slips past
I figured it was time again for a human post when I noticed 300 for potpourri on the dashboard, and the month of February gone by without one. The 3ooth was an automated Diigo bookmarks compilation. Does extending the dashboard metaphor mean I was asleep at the wheel?
No, the three such automated posts last month represent about thirty Diigo bookmarks (February 2011). What with categories, highlights, notations, quotations, and tags as options, not to forget [group sharing,] Diigo-to-blog and -to-Delicious output options and other extensions, I'm beginning to think of Diigo as my micro-blogging engine of choice!
As the chart in the graphic and figures below indicate, total numbers of visitors and countries from which they hail continue on modest upward trends.
No, the three such automated posts last month represent about thirty Diigo bookmarks (February 2011). What with categories, highlights, notations, quotations, and tags as options, not to forget [group sharing,] Diigo-to-blog and -to-Delicious output options and other extensions, I'm beginning to think of Diigo as my micro-blogging engine of choice!
As the chart in the graphic and figures below indicate, total numbers of visitors and countries from which they hail continue on modest upward trends.
2010-10-15 79 2338
2010-11-00 n.d. n.d.
2010-12-15 80 2397
2011-01-00 n.d. n.d.
2011-02-15 81 2444
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Mendeley sync's ... [from] CiteULike
I've accepted an invitation to adopt Mendeley desktop and online bibliographic reference management applications, whose features Mendeley Research Networks summarize here. They work with Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows, as well as online, so you can use Mendeley just about anywhere. It was quick and easy to sign-up, and start a profile.
The Import to Mendeley bookmarklet, found through a dismiss-able feature link in the profile sidebar, dragged and dropped sweetly into a biblio. folder in my Xmarks synchronized Firefox Bookmarks toolbar. The CiteULike Importer (Account Settings) set up was almost as dreamy.
I wonder how long it takes to get CiteULike references flowing [in-]to Mendeley, and how seamless sharing references with collaborators will be.
Addenda: Although adding spot-on articles highlighted by Mendeley at login was a piece of cake (shown first by field, perhaps filtered through new research interests), I've found no trace of previous CiteULike citations coming through to Mendeley over the past hour or so. I checked to make sure the CiteULike Importer connection was hot. Anyone know a way to release the backlog?
The Import to Mendeley bookmarklet, found through a dismiss-able feature link in the profile sidebar, dragged and dropped sweetly into a biblio. folder in my Xmarks synchronized Firefox Bookmarks toolbar. The CiteULike Importer (Account Settings) set up was almost as dreamy.
I wonder how long it takes to get CiteULike references flowing [in-]to Mendeley, and how seamless sharing references with collaborators will be.
Addenda: Although adding spot-on articles highlighted by Mendeley at login was a piece of cake (shown first by field, perhaps filtered through new research interests), I've found no trace of previous CiteULike citations coming through to Mendeley over the past hour or so. I checked to make sure the CiteULike Importer connection was hot. Anyone know a way to release the backlog?
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Diigo bookmarking for Learning with Computers
To increase visibility of a Learning with Computers group discussion going on in Diigo, just one of several venues in which members of that group interact, I'm going to cross-post here a bit that I wrote there:
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The Learning with Computers group venue @ Diigo is public. Please feel free to share comments here, or join us there.
I'd like to offer some reflections based on observations and suggestions that other participants have made already. To those I will add a few of my own ideas about collective bookmarking.
Joao Alves (among others) urges us to adopt the "tags Diigo suggests...[, and]... agree on a special tag for the group like 'LWC' that we would always add to every bookmark we tagged" (message 5).
Recommended tags are a start, but I'm always curious about who recommends them, and what for. I suppose they represent collective practices that may be more spontaneous or less focused than ours. LWC sounds quick, and easy to remember, yet may be quite obscure to other Diigo uses who don't already know that it stands for Learning with Computers.
After many hours on screen, I prefer tags with greater visual definition than all CAP's, so CamelCase is my favorite for MultiWordTags. I'm not sure, however, whether Diigo defeats capitalization. If not, I'd prefer something like LwC.
Joao goes on to suggest,"Organizing tags in topics or bundles like in del.icio.us would be helpful to find the most relevant site about the subject we are interested in." Though bundles in del.icio.us are quite powerful in that they enable multi-purpose uses of individual tags, as well as consolidation of similar ones, I have a distinct impression that bundling may work better with single word tags.
Having done most of my bookmarking in del.icio.us, up to now, I've hardly ever felt a need to double or triple up on words, since searching for intersections or conjunctions between tag sets in del.icio.us is a given. I'm looking forward to finding out whether Diigo offers such powerful search options.
Mary Hillis points out: "... [Y]ou could simply use quotation marks for "lesson plan". Maybe this is another advantage of using Diigo" (message 4), and Joao agrees: "... [Q]uotation marks are very useful to write tags that have 2 or more words. I have always appreciated this feature in Flickr" (message 5). The use of quotation marks to demarcate exact phases may be common to Ma.gnolia bookmarking as well.
Earlier on Susana expressed preference for using nouns as tags (message 3), a preference we share to some extent. I tended to use plural forms for countable nouns. I still do sometimes hoping that bookmarking tool search engines will recognize the word noun as a subset of the category nouns more readily, perhaps, than they recognize the word nouns as a derivative of the tag noun.
If such search parameters aren't available yet, they should be. Otherwise, generic web searches for exact quotations and partial character strings may more than suffice for finding content for which interpretation into special terminology is unnecessary.
I've also experimented with a greatest common denominator strategy that works, I imagine, rather like a bundling strategy for similar tags. Take, for instance, collaborat, a tag I tend to favor in de.licio.us to capture the essence of collaborate, collaboration, collaborative, and collaborators. Nevertheless[,] I realize that tags such as collaborat, like the tailor-made one Susana mentioned, edudiigolwc, call for awareness-raising, if not public definition and explanation, in order to be of use to wider and wider groups of bookmark browsers or connoisseurs.
Tag clouds added to blogs, for instance, or provided in group bookmarking tools themselves, for example: de.licio.us and Ma.gnolia, are means of raising awareness. Yet Diigo, as options for individual commentary, comments earmarked for groups, and discussions like this one illustrate, affords ample opportunities for explanation in situ to those wish to elaborate for the benefit of a community such as the Learning with Computers cohort. What a pleasure it is!
Joao Alves (among others) urges us to adopt the "tags Diigo suggests...[, and]... agree on a special tag for the group like 'LWC' that we would always add to every bookmark we tagged" (message 5).
Recommended tags are a start, but I'm always curious about who recommends them, and what for. I suppose they represent collective practices that may be more spontaneous or less focused than ours. LWC sounds quick, and easy to remember, yet may be quite obscure to other Diigo uses who don't already know that it stands for Learning with Computers.
After many hours on screen, I prefer tags with greater visual definition than all CAP's, so CamelCase is my favorite for MultiWordTags. I'm not sure, however, whether Diigo defeats capitalization. If not, I'd prefer something like LwC.
Joao goes on to suggest,"Organizing tags in topics or bundles like in del.icio.us would be helpful to find the most relevant site about the subject we are interested in." Though bundles in del.icio.us are quite powerful in that they enable multi-purpose uses of individual tags, as well as consolidation of similar ones, I have a distinct impression that bundling may work better with single word tags.
Having done most of my bookmarking in del.icio.us, up to now, I've hardly ever felt a need to double or triple up on words, since searching for intersections or conjunctions between tag sets in del.icio.us is a given. I'm looking forward to finding out whether Diigo offers such powerful search options.
Mary Hillis points out: "... [Y]ou could simply use quotation marks for "lesson plan". Maybe this is another advantage of using Diigo" (message 4), and Joao agrees: "... [Q]uotation marks are very useful to write tags that have 2 or more words. I have always appreciated this feature in Flickr" (message 5). The use of quotation marks to demarcate exact phases may be common to Ma.gnolia bookmarking as well.
Earlier on Susana expressed preference for using nouns as tags (message 3), a preference we share to some extent. I tended to use plural forms for countable nouns. I still do sometimes hoping that bookmarking tool search engines will recognize the word noun as a subset of the category nouns more readily, perhaps, than they recognize the word nouns as a derivative of the tag noun.
If such search parameters aren't available yet, they should be. Otherwise, generic web searches for exact quotations and partial character strings may more than suffice for finding content for which interpretation into special terminology is unnecessary.
I've also experimented with a greatest common denominator strategy that works, I imagine, rather like a bundling strategy for similar tags. Take, for instance, collaborat, a tag I tend to favor in de.licio.us to capture the essence of collaborate, collaboration, collaborative, and collaborators. Nevertheless[,] I realize that tags such as collaborat, like the tailor-made one Susana mentioned, edudiigolwc, call for awareness-raising, if not public definition and explanation, in order to be of use to wider and wider groups of bookmark browsers or connoisseurs.
Tag clouds added to blogs, for instance, or provided in group bookmarking tools themselves, for example: de.licio.us and Ma.gnolia, are means of raising awareness. Yet Diigo, as options for individual commentary, comments earmarked for groups, and discussions like this one illustrate, affords ample opportunities for explanation in situ to those wish to elaborate for the benefit of a community such as the Learning with Computers cohort. What a pleasure it is!
(How should we use the tagging system to better organize our group bookmarking, message 6, 2008.06.24 [JST])
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The Learning with Computers group venue @ Diigo is public. Please feel free to share comments here, or join us there.
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Welcome to pab's potpourri!
This is an experimental, informal blog for learning about blogging, blog development, and blog-related professional development activities.
