Raquelle Brennan and Mindi Maneck presented on Diigo and social bookmarking. We logged in and/or created accounts, including applying for an Educator Upgrade. Judy Gressel explained that with the toolbar, diigo will suggest tags for you and you can see how others have tagged a site, plus that if you have bookmarked multiple sites, you can just hit “play as slide show” to create a display as students come into a room. Raquelle and Mindi discussed making lists in Diigo and setting up groups. Raquelle noted that you can follow groups (e.g., diigo in education) and see what others are bookmarking. She also advocated using diigolet since it becomes a single button on your toolbar.
We also experimented with capturing an image. Erika mentioned how you could create links and pages with images and annotations and have a full lesson plan ready to go if you had a sub. There were questions about public versus private lists – and about diigo versus delicious. The general view seemed to be that delicious is the same idea, although simpler, with somewhat less functionality.
Judy Gressel commented briefly on Group me.com. She noted that one possible concern is with advertising and privacy. Andy Horne asked about whether group members would see your telephone number (a downside with current system). He asked whether they can text you back and wondered about how many people could receive a text simultaneously. We talked about possibly trying GroupMe amongst ourselves to try to investigate these questions.
Linda Straube then segued to a recent report on the State of Mobile Web. She recommended scrolling down to view data and graphs which would be especially of interest to geography classes; It seemed like that this topic (cell phone use) would be high interest for students and offer several points for discussion such as
• Comparing these results versus population figures and literacy rates;
• Looking at the most visited web sites by country
• Observing differences in cultural norms (e.g., attitudes towards acceptability of texting during a meal).
• Noting the relative privilege of the US and Western users which comes across in differing patterns in mobile phone brand adoption and in responses to questions like: “How old were you when you first browsed the Web?”
Our next meeting is Tuesday morning, December 14th at 7:30am in Jim Foster’s office. We will continue with social bookmarking and talk about any questions about diigo. For the majority of the time Raquelle will plan to show delicious, including a sheet with screen shots or other instructions.
In attendance: Raquelle Brennan, Erika Eich, Judy Gressel, Andy Horne, Mindi Maneck, Keta McCarthy, and Linda Straube. Ian and Matt intended to join us, but were in conferences with students.
