Week 5: Getting down with Diigo and starting to populate

This week we will get everyone going on using Diigo and start collecting resources and tagging them. Some have had success in getting into Diigo already and have been able to get into the group. For those looking for guidance in getting into the group, here are a few steps to try:

  1. Make sure you have a Diigo account and you are logged in
  2. On the top of the screen you will see a menu item titled "My Groups"... click that
  3. You will now see a box in the far top right ... click the following to see a screen shot (Group menu picture
  4. Click in that box and type in "LINCS Educational Resources" (without the " ") and search for that group
  5. You should then be able to request an invitation to join that group
  6. Alternatively you can email me ohgeer@gmail.com an I can copy/paste you in

Please take a moment to review our categories to offer suggestions as there have been many edits this last weekend. The idea is that we use the bold items and copy/paste them as written as tags in diigo to offer consistency in our tagging. By Thursday or Friday, it should be open season on people starting to tag resources. 

If you should like to try tagging some things, please keep in mind that we want to tag parts of sites that specifically meet a need described by our category. If we tag to a general landing place of a site that has many possibilities, a user might be frustrated because they were expecting a specific option. In other words, the more specific we can link to items that address a category we have established, the more efficient searchers will be in getting to what they want. 

Thoughts, questions and suggestions always welcome !!!! Looking forward to seeing what we start digging up later this week!

 

Comments

David and everyone,  I am hopeful that people may start tagging resources by the end of the week and into next week as well. There are some that have never explored Diigo and I wanted to ensure they had time to review and ask questions before they felt they needed to "keep up" with early adopters that dive right in the deep end of things often. If you need time to get into Diigo and get comfy, please take this week to get up to speed and feel free to ask questions. If you feel all ready to go, dive in and let us know how warm the water is 

With that in mind, I think that the sooner we hit the ground running the better as there is never enough time it seems. If people are in the group and want to start tagging, here are a few thoughts to keep in mind:

  • Please work to consistently use the same tags we have set up so it is much easier to sort and sift when we get to the evaluation stages. Since we can use multiple tags, it is acceptable to use both the general categories (numbered items) and the sub categories (lettered items) from our list. If possible, try to not just tag only a general category unless the tool/resources you found just does not easily fit into one of the sub categories we have listed. 
  • When tagging with a tag that has more than one word, which is all of ours for the most part, you should use " " around the tag. Otherwise each word you enter becomes a tag!
  • Our goal this week and into next week is to grab as many items as we can into each category. We are effectively brainstorming the Internet. Although we are not judging the quality of any of these items at this stage, please try to avoid tagging things that you know will have extremely limited use in the field. Continually think about our end clients, real administrators, educators and learners looking for help, ideas and suggestions. 
  • If you need some help or guidance in using Diigo, please let the group know (or if you prefer hit me up in email) and we can provide support to get you more comfortable with this powerful tool. 
  • In every tag, there is a Description field in which you can summarize (2-3 sentences or so, paragraph at most) what the resources or tool's main functions are and why a person associated with Adult Ed may be interested in following the link. There is no need to get into subjective evaluations in the Description field as we have a much more detailed tool we will be using in the following weeks. Simply what the tool/resource is can suffice. These fields can be edited at a later date. 
  • When tagging, please don't forget to choose the appropriate group "LINCS Educational Resources" from the drop down on the bottom of the tagging window. This is ultra important because if you forget this step, your tag simply goes to your library and all of us miss out on those golden nuggets you wished to share. 
  • IMPORTANT: Although there are great repositories and collections out there, please don't tag those. Instead tag each item in those collections with tags appropriate for each item in the collection. Users are very frustrated to follow a link they think will get them to a tool to help them make a blog only to find it links to someone's collection of hundreds of other online tools the user must now sift through to find just the blogging tools she was looking for. Please avoid tagging sites that require users to have to dig even more to get to the goodies they were hoping to get to with the first click. 

If anyone comes up with future tagging suggestions or guidelines, please use the word "TAGGING: " in your subject line as I have done above to help others more easily find your input later on. 

It appears many on the East coast may be under some snow tomorrow (Tuesday) so if you get the itch to start tagging, have at it :) I hope everyone is having a great week so far and I look forward to seeing all the goodies we find in the next couple of weeks. 

 

Happy Wednesday everyone! I understand that most of us have very busy lives so please don't take this as pushing in any way. Rather, I just wanted to reiterate that if you are having difficulties getting into Diigo or figuring out how it works, please feel free to reach out. We have 4 individuals in there now and some experiments and playing around have brought to light a few points you may wish to know.

  • In Diigo, the group may make a library of tags which would simply allow us to make a drop down to choose a tag. Since our tags are all more than one word, that feature would be great. I tried putting out tags in, but it appears the tag library for a drop down is limited and we have more tags we wish to use than the library will store. That leaves us with manually entering tags in.
  • I have found the following procedure easiest to do tagging. I have two windows up with our categories on one window and my my browser I am searching the web on the other window. When I find something I wish to tag, I go to the categories window, highlight the bold sub category I wish, then copy (ctrl-c). I can then click over to my searching window and hit my Diigo plug in, click save, then in the tag field I type in one quote ( " ) and paste (ctrl-v) then another quote". In this way I ensure I have the same tag as we have in our category document. 
  • If you should make a mistake, such as forgetting to put the "  " around your tag, Diigo will break the phrase up into individual word tags, there is a way to edit those tags and even delete them. When you are looking at our Diigo Group list, under each entry there are some text menu items. The right most says "More" and clicking that you should see the option to "Edit". When you edit, you can change the name of the resource you are tagging and you can change the tagging field as well. I have found this a very useful feature as I have messed up a few tags already :)
  • Some may wonder how we look at the "stuff" we have collected in different ways. On the right side of our Diigo Group page there is a "Top 10 tags" section. That is somewhat useful, but to the right of that option there is the "View All" option. There are two tabs that then show up. The default tab "Alpha" displays all of our tags used so far in alphabetical order. The second tab, "Freq" arranges the tags in order of which tags are used most frequently. It will also alter the text size so that any tag that is used most is larger font. This may be a great way for us to see where we are focusing our energies and which categories might need more attention or options if we can find any. This data may also be helpful to share with the field to encourage companies and innovators to develop more in the categories we were unable to find a good selection of. 
  • Above the items we have tagged in our group, there are two buttons, Bookmarks and Topics. Bookmarks is another way to enter in a website. You would copy the URL then paste it in the Bookmarks dialog box that pops up. I find this much slower than the Diigo browser plug in option, but some may wish to try using Bookmark just to explore. The Topics is a group forum for discussion. Since we have our discussions already set up on LINCS, I would suggest we not use the Topics in that group as it would get people looking all over for conversations. I just wanted to share what those two buttons were for in case you were curious. 

If I can get some time in the next day or so, I would love to do up a screen cast and share that. For those of us that are visual and have already stopped reading this post because there are way too many words, having a video/picture guide may be helpful :)

The above bullets were discoveries by people playing around and sharing questions (email was used but forums work too). The more we explore this tool and this method of "brainstorming" the Internet, the easier this process looks. 

Please reach out if you find difficulties or make discoveries you feel others might benefit from as you start exploring this exciting process!