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Discovered via Jim Groom as I follow his exceptionally ambitious ds106 open/resident course at the University of Mary Washington. I knew as soon as I saw it I wanted to participate, but I also knew there was no way I could give it the attention it will demand. Next time.

The thing that really prompted this post has been watching the Bava’s animated gif interest grow. It blows my mind that the animated gif is making such a huge comeback. Honestly I love the complexity and simplicity of the animated gif. Once the purveyor of website construction status is now becoming one of the more powerful ways to express feeling online — simply.

I remember actually learning how to do this as a Masters degree student back in 1995. Of course our animated gifs were really, really lame. But in hindsight they were actually really exceptional given the times. Makes me realize just how young the web really is … that makes me smile.

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Blogs at Penn State 2011 Update

I am preparing my closing plenary for the upcoming Educause Mid-Atlantic conference to be held in Baltimore, MD and thought I’d share something I’ve been diving into related to the Blogs at Penn State. My colleague, Brad Kozlek oversees much of what happens with that service and one of the things I ask him to do is to maintain data on the use of the service. He updated our shared google spreadsheet for me today so I could share some of it all at the event later this week.

There are a couple of things I am noticing and am very proud of … one is that the service is really being used and it is being used in so many novel and interesting ways. I’ll try to share some of those during my talk. The other thing we are discovering is that over time it appears that people are becoming more active users … that means they don’t just make a blog and bail. That has important implications — more on that in a future post and at a talk Bart Pursel and I will give at ELI — and those implications include rising GPAs for those who are sticking with writing. Amazing stuff. For now I just thought I’d share the numbers …

My favorite Twitter conversation in days was a result of sharing this …

Invited Panel: 3/14/2011: Social Media Symposium

I was recently invited to be part of a panel discussion focusing on the role of social media in medical education and clinical practice at the Penn State College of Medicine.  It is an interesting topic given the realities of HIPAA and all the issues surrounding medicine.  It will be an honor to visit with colleagues from the Hershey Medical center for the Social Media Symposium.  I have  a feeling I'll learn more as a panelist than I will have to offer.

Taking a Look at Diigo … Again

Since all the drama last month revolving around the (non) closure of delicious I decided to take a second (or third) look at diigo as the place to manage not just my bookmarks but my ability to easily share online resources. I’ve always thought of delicious as so much more than an anytime/anyplace bookmark tool … it is a social network in every single way. I’ve been an active user since the early days and have used it in my teaching for quite some time and have always seen it as part of a larger teaching and learning toolset. Through the years I’ve used it faithfully, but the way Yahoo appears to be treating the service I thought I better see what else is out there to support my needs and interests going forward.

I will say that delicious still feels better to me, but that is more than likely because of familiarity. After importing all my delicious links into diigo and banging around a bit I am very impressed. I love the ability to highlight parts of pages I am reading and easily add comments from within the browser … I also like that when I view my library I not only see my bookmarks, but also the highlighted content I was initially impressed with. I am enjoying the groups and really like that it is helping me keep my eyes on what some important people in my professional life are paying attention to.

Its not so much that I am late to the diigo party, its just that I may have stayed over at del.icio.us’ place a little too long.

The other day I filled out a request to get an educator account at diigo and was rewarded with that a day later. I haven’t yet fully explored what it all means, but at first glance it looks like I can create a very simple social network for storing, managing, and sharing content with groups of students quickly and easily by importing a class list. I would recommend investigating the affordances of the diigo educator account and sharing some thoughts.

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I’m still playing with this tool for teaching and learning … I’d like to push beyond the notion of a simple shared space for collecting resources. I am sure that when my friend and colleague, Scott McDonald and I tee up our Disruptive Technology in Teaching and Learning course we’ll be taking advantage of what a tool like this has to offer in some new and interesting ways. I am beginning to wonder how we as an Institution could find a way to partner with the folks at diigo … what would that relationship look like and how could we make it play out in a positive sense in the mid to long term? I’d love to hear about how people are using diigo in their teaching as well in managing their own professional lives.