Social Bookmarking

I got signed up with Diigo easily enough, and filled out an application for the educator account. I still haven't heard back on that, but I explored Diigo with my basic account. I decided to just use the Diigolet while I was testing it, so I dragged that to my toolbar with no problem. When I tried to use it, however, big problem--it kept asking me to log in (even though I was already), when I logged in, it would just say that Diigolet failed. I got frustrated and gave up, then came back to it today and tried posting it as a bug in the User forum. Then found it listed as a bug with Firefox, and a suggested fix was to allow third-party cookies or put diigo.com as an exception. I did the latter, and voila, it worked.

Now this leads me to a concern I have with all these Web 2.0 tools. It seems like they want to leave cookies of all sorts, or in the case of blogging, won't work because of cookies, in which case you're supposed to clear out all your cache and cookies to make a dumb comment on a blog. I am not sure if this problem is specific to Firefox, and perhaps another browser such as Chrome works better. Maybe I'll try Chrome, as has been suggested to me. When I find time.

Anyway, back to Diigo. I added a few things to my library. One is an article from the Center for History and New Media about the benefits and perils of the wealth of primary historical sources being digitized and available on the Internet at the Library of Congress and elsewhere. Another is an article on Newport and leisure, which I can use in my course on Consumer Culture, where I talk about conspicuous consumption and use Newport as an example. The other two are biographies of a woman who wrote an article that I am going to use in the book I'm working on. So it's a variety of things. I highlighted some things on them, and did a few sticky notes, and created tags. You can check out my diigo library here. Finally, I checked out a few of the most popular bookmarked sites. I saw the tags for the articles, but didn't see any comments or highlighting when I clicked on them. So I'm not sure how that works. My favorite of the ones I looked at was Slate's piece on Google Reader joining the "graveyard of dead Google products." It had tombstones for all the different dead products, and you can click on it to place flowers on the graves. If you haven't seen this yet, it's worth a giggle: Google graveyard. I found this particularly funny since I just had to open a Google Reader account for TOEP. Another danger of the ole Web 2.0, I guess.

Blog comment frustration

This is a call for help! I am having a problem trying to comment on blogs. I have tried this choosing both "Google account" and "Open ID" and putting in my blog URL. Neither works. When I hit "post," my comments disappear and nothing is posted. Now, I did comment earlier (Presentation Tools entry) on my own blog and it worked fine. Today I tried it and it won't work. I have tried to post comments on several people's blogs without success. I looked up the comments help on Blogger and followed the directions. I must be missing something, so perhaps someone could enlighten me!

Update: I was able to post a comment successfully to a blog that was done on Word Press, but have been unsuccessful with Blogger.

Newsreader

I have never tried the newsreader before, and find it a bit off-putting. I don't really keep up with a lot of blogs or online media, other than my NY Times account. I am old-fashioned enough to subscribe to an actual newspaper and read it every morning! But I set up an account and subscribed to a couple of general news feeds, such as Huff Post. And then I found a couple of museum blogs for the New-York Historical Society and the American Antiquarian Society, and set up those subscriptions. I teach public history courses, so I thought those could be useful. It was easy enough to subscribe, but I'm not sure how much I will really use this tool. Time will tell, I guess. I cannot think offhand of how I could use it for teaching; perhaps in a public history course I could have students subscribe to a museum blog?

Productivity Tools

I explored Google Docs and Dropbox. I find Dropbox quite useful for work, as I can work on lectures and documents from home or at work. I have been using it a lot for preparing for my classes. I haven't used the sharing or collaboration features, however.

I have used the collaborative features (to an extent) with Google Drive and Google Sites. I had students develop exhibits in a local history course using Google Sites, but they (and I) found it clunky to use. I haven't tried it recently. Last semester I learned about Google Docs in a workshop on campus, and then used it for two of my course projects. For one course, I created a shared document  to which students could post the biographies they had researched and written. In this way we created a class "Biographical Dictionary" of Industrial America, which the students then had to read and discuss in class. I also created an instruction document. I was generally pleased with how this worked, and include a link: HIST 330 Industrial America Biographies.  For my research seminar I used Google Drive for a peer editing assignment. Students had to post their rough drafts and provide access (for comments) to their peer editors, who had to read and comment on the drafts. Again, this worked well, with only minor glitches.

In sum, I would use Google Drive again for course assignments, although I am not doing so this semester, as I do not have an appropriate assignment. I also will continue to use Dropbox, and may explore the collaborative features as I grow more comfortable with it. I could see this more as a tool  for collaborating with colleagues at other universities, for instance.

Blogs and Wikis

I have belatedly looked at this exercise, weeks after starting my blog. It helped to clarify some of the differences between blogs and wikis. I have found Blogger quite easy to use, and would be interested in maybe using it in a class in the future, if the logistics wouldn't be too awful.

I have experience using a Wiki from an NEH summer seminar I went to hosted by Bard Graduate School. They use Wiki.dot, so I got a bit of experience using that. I found it a little more confusing than the Blogger, but I imagine if I used it regularly, that would go away. Interestingly enough, a number of the professors there use Wikis to organize their courses and for student assignments and such. I thought it was pretty cool the way they did that, but the tech guy there pointed out that you would have to have strong tech support for both set-up and maintenance. So I am skeptical of its efficacy at Fredonia. Of course, Bard's is a very small, graduate student only program, and one with the $$ to hire amazing tech support!

Social Media

This one is a bit of a hard one for me. I have resisted joining Facebook for years (and continue to do so), and really don't have any interest in Twitter either. I found out when looking at the list of social media sites, however, that I do use some, such as Yelp. I am signed up for Linked In but don't really use it; it doesn't seem useful to me. I just joined because people I knew kept inviting me. But then I don't see why once I go to the site. I was intrigued by Fakebook, and may use that for a class in the future.

So it was easy to choose Pinterest here, especially because I had heard a speaker at a recent Digital Humanities conference suggest using it for a student project. I am teaching Material Culture this semester, and had decided that my students could use it to create a display (board, in correct terminology) related to the artifact that they are choosing to research. So I read up on it and joined Pinterest. At first I found it confusing. They ask you to "follow" 5 boards at the outset, and then they all show up somewhat randomly on your home screen. I was confused by that. But then I created my own board about places I'd like to travel to; it is a work in progress, as there are many many places I'd love to go to! I found that it is very easy to pin things, and you just write a brief caption and it's done. I pinned several photos of places I want to or plan to go to, and I also re-pinned one from another travel board, and added a comment to a pin about Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. I haven't yet explored whether there are ways to organize your boards, which I think there are.

In sum, I think this tool is fun, but a bit limited. If all you want to do is show pictures with short captions, it's great, and I think it will work well for the assignment I have planned for my students. But it doesn't allow for much textual analysis, and I don't know how much one can organize an "exhibit" on a board. I haven't found a way to do so, anyway. Here is a link to my pinterest board.