Saturday, May 1, 2010

Diigo snafus

I was trying to use Diigo with one of my classes last week and the experiment sort of blew up in my face. I don't know whether I had things set up incorrectly, but there were a lot of screwy things happening that we couldn't quite figure out. I'll mention at the outset that if anyone out there has experience with Diigo, please send along your thoughts on these snafus we were experiencing.

Weirdness #1: I had all my students set up an account, then we went to an article on The Catcher in the Rye that I had previously highlighted and put sticky notes on. Some students could see my sticky notes, while others could not. We found that if students exited out of their web browsers and then opened them again, they then could see the sticky notes, but there were a few students who never could see the sticky notes.

Weirdness #2: I often could not see all the comments that had been made. For instance, a sticky note would had a number "8" on it, but when I dragged over it, I could only see 4 comments. Even odder, when I accessed the page later, notes that had previously had a certain number of comments now showed fewer comments. The difference between the number of comments that should be there and the number I can actually read remains, too.

Weirdness #3: At one point, a boy was messing around and highlighted nearly the entire article. This highlight showed up on everyone's version of the article. It remains on my copy of the article every time I access it through my bookmark of the page. Very annoying. I love that I can see my highlights, but I don't want to see those of other people.

I was hoping that I would be having students sign up for a tool they could use in the academic years to come, and I'm sure that may be the case once we can figure out how to work. However, at the end of the class when I asked them how they liked it, they booed. It sort of worked and when it did, it was great, but it never lived up to its promise. Or we just couldn't figure it out.

There are other things about Diigo I don't fully get. As I understand it, if I go to any web site with Diigo, I can see all the sticky notes anybody with a Diigo account has made for that site, right? Yet when I go to sites that I'm sure Diigo users must be accessing - NPR.org, for instance - I see nothing. So no one with a Diigo account is commenting on any of the news stories on NPR? How can this be? I must be doing someting wrong.

My apologies to Diigo and all associated with it for the comments. I feel a little like I should send a fruit basket. I'm really looking for answers to how I can use this seemingly remarkable tool... well, at all.

1 comment:

tech guy said...

Tom-
We don’t have a parking lot for questions although we certainly should. I guess I generally assume people will email us or post to their blog but in terms of which is more efficient I’m not sure. We could also have put a section in OneNote.

Sounds like a bumpy experience with Diigo but I certainly applaud you making the Diigo effort. This is the tutorial that I have found most useful for Diigo.
http://www.slideshare.net/cliotech/diigo-tutorial-presentation

I tinker with Twitter and don’t think it would necessarily give you an answer either. To have the answers flow like the wine you mention you need to have followers and getting followers takes time. When I get stuck with something and have no local answer which often the case when you are using a new tool or newish tool you have a few options. First off I Google the heck out of my problem. More often than not that will get me an answer. One way you can use Twitter (and it doesn’t have to be on your phone) is to post your question with a hashtag something like #diigo and people working for diigo would subscribe to a feed of that tag and hopefully respond to your question.

Other options are to become a part of a larger community online in which you might be able to post your question. I think we talked about this site already but make sure you are a member of
http://englishcompanion.ning.com/ (here is a sample discussion of other teachers discussing diigo usage http://englishcompanion.ning.com/group/teachingwithtechnology/forum/topics/anyone-using-diigo) and an even bigger user group with be the classroom 2.0 ning at http://www.classroom20.com. Either of those sites are free for the asking.

I use both Delicious and Diigo but not all the time. For what you are trying to do you need to use Diigo. There are too many questions and variable to give you a direct answer. First I would want to know if the work you’ve done is from home or school and if kids are having trouble same thing….are they working at home or school? I ask this because I find the Internet Explorer (the program) and then many different Web 2.0 tools work different at school because of how the county regulates internet traffic and how things can flow. Ie There are some people who will trouble posting to a blog while at school….while at home they have no problem. Beyond that I would want to know how you are using Diigo. Did you download any special toolbars or bookmarklets from Diigo and have your students done the same thing? Is everyone using the same browswer? Are you setting up a Diigo group and then having students with their own Diigo accounts join that group? If you are doing a group that would be a next step that I think would really help. Kerry, Kim Given was planning on doing this kind of work with students using Diigo and perhaps she can tell you what her successes where with groups, annotations and highlighting.

Good luck and perhaps on next class we can look more closely at the problem.

Mark