Category Archives: Web Tools

Open Course Repositories Online or The Best Things in Life Are Free

Along with the general increase in the number and availability of online resources, educational or otherwise, the last decade has seen a growing trend towards developing complete post-secondary-education courses that can be made available online for free. In contrast to the widely varying quality and the general absence of systematic and educational-research-backed course-design standards that characterize online courses offered at a premium from a growing number of traditional or exclusively online higher-education institutions, the quality and standards of these free courses is consistently high—probably a reflection of the kinds of faculty and institutions willing to devote time and expertise to free education.

Examples

I) MIT’s Open Course Ware (OCW), established by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, currently offers over 1,800 online courses that are enriched with multimedia content and teach thirty-five subject areas within the arts, sciences, and humanities. Being created exclusively by MIT, OCW is backed by MIT’s commitment for permanent updates but is not open to user contributions. It is essentially an electronic and multimedia-enriched version of almost all of MIT’s academic curriculum, including lecture notes, video lectures, exams, etc., offered for free, offering no certification or credit, requiring no registration, and, as indicated on the site, providing access to “materials that may not reflect the entire content of a [given] course.”

II) In a slightly different approach, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative currently offers an eclectic list of only about a dozen courses, which, however, are fully and exclusively developed for online students and are supported by ongoing educational research addressing course design and outcomes. Faculty from all over the world can create a free account and use the repository’s tools to create online courses that can be offered for free or at a nominal fee if credit is required. An educational initiative of a much larger scope than MIT’s OCW, the Open Learning Initiative organizes symposia, maintains pedagogical and education-technology blogs, and offers workshops on using and customizing existing-courses and on developing new, effective online courses.

III) Connexions is a collaborative, free, scholarly content archive that seems to share useful features from both resources discussed above, so I will be spending some more time on it.

The Connexions project started at Rice University in 1999, with the first non-Rice Connexions course contributed by the University of Illinois in 2002. Similarly to MIT’s OCW, Connexions has grown extensively and currently holds over 4,500 course modules, covering most typical disciplines and topics addressed in higher education. Similarly to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, new content is welcome and can easily be created by faculty from around the world, following a simple registration process.

The resource offers full courses (called ‘collections’), individual course modules, or stand-alone learning activities. Materials and learning activities are very well aligned, while remaining modular for flexibility in course customization. Based on my use of the resource, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness instructors are best off mixing and matching modules and activities from multiple collections and possibly supplementing them with additional (especially multimedia) materials. Connexions holdings are often linked to relevant course Web sites within the authors’ academic institutions, providing additional resources and context for understanding the materials.

The numerous items related to music (my area of expertise) are listed under “Arts,” with thirteen of the seventeen “collections” and approximately a third of the over four-hundred modules within Arts addressing music or sound-related topics. Items related to acoustics can also be found under “Science and Technology,” and, following a recent partnership with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), Connexions will also be developing a set of signal-processing educational modules and courses.

In its vast majority, the content is accurate, well presented, supported by references to relevant literature, and occasionally enhanced through multimedia resources. Depending on subject area, special plug-ins may be required, all of which are downloadable from within the relevant learning object’s page. Usability features may change slightly with each course and contributor, but all courses/modules checked are clearly organized and very easy to use. The repository itself is also well organized and visually appealing, and it has clear instructions for use when necessary. Although not formally peer-reviewed, the collections are monitored by an editorial team and an oversight board, helping maintain high content standards.

The quality and learning impact of the resource was recently recognized by Harvard University’s Berkman Award (Berkman Center for Internet & Society), presented to Connexions founder and Rice University professor R. Baraniuk for his role in creating the repository. The learning impact and sustainability of this and other open educational resource repositories was addressed in a recent article from the Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects.

We are all usually wary of anything offered for free, and for good reason. When it comes to free education, however, there are serious reasons (e.g. motivation of those offering it) and evidence (see above) that support rehashing the cliché: “the best things in life are free!” I have personally found the free resources discussed very useful and plan to become a contributor in the near future.

Online Tools to Aid Design of Your Course

Here are a few templates and tools that can be used by a faculty member who either does not have the resources of an instructional designer at hand or merely chooses not to work with an instructional designer. The core standard for a well-designed course is the alignment of the objectives with the course assessments, learning activities and learning materials.

The central pieces of course are the learning objectives. That is where course design begins and against which course outcomes are measured.

This location is interactive and can actually help you build measurable learning objectives for your course based on Bloom’s Taxonomy! www.radiojames.com/ObjectivesBuilder

Mager’s Tips on Learning Objectives. This site includes my favorite “cheat sheet” for writing objectives: the list of observable verbs! There are two lists: one for the cognitive domain and one for the affective domain:
www2.gsu.edu/~mstmbs/CrsTools/Magerobj.html

Once the Learning Objectives are clearly written and measurable, it is amazing how the remaining course design elements will fall into place. In our training sessions designed to prepare faculty members to teach online, we’ve used several templates as guides for faculty to aid in aligning assessments and activities with objectives. Our current version is available here. As a synthesis of many other templates from across the U.S., it may very well look familiar!

What Can Online Educators Learn from Advertising?

When the final numbers are counted, online advertising is expected to have grown over 25 percent in 2007 to over $21 billion (BusinessWeek). Even a struggling U.S. economy and a looming recession don’t seem capable of stopping the party any time soon (www.clickz.com). One reason online ad spending has grown so rapidly is its ability to provide very detailed analytics. Online campaigns allow advertisers to gather very granular information on who saw an ad, when, how may times, and so on. Ad firms have whole staffs devoted to tracking online campaigns, evaluating data, and determining the effectiveness of the campaign. DoubleClick and Nielson/NetRatings generate millions each year helping to aggregate this data.

Ideally, online classes should be subject to the same level of analysis. Faculty and instructional designers have lots of tools to assist them with the planning and implementation of an online class but very little to assist them in evaluating the class and improving on it for the next quarter or semester. Data is often hard to get at (Have you ever tried to make sense of server logs?) and often there is not enough time and resources to produce a meaningful report that provides any insight.

That’s why I am excited by the Backlot Content Management System by Ooyala. Designed as a video-ad-campaign manager, the system allows you to quickly generate really useful reports that will be extremely valuable to online educators. Backlot lets you see how many times a video was watched, how much of it was watched, how many students watched it, how many times students replayed the video, etc.

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The reporting interface is easy to use, and Backlot includes a download-to-Excel feature should you want to slice and dice your data even more. It beats trying to decipher server logs. I think it can be a huge asset in allowing educators and researchers to truly determine the effectiveness of video in online classrooms.

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Will Pre-Teens Still Love Virtual Worlds When They’re Old Enough to Drive?

A recent article in the New York Times (see Web Playgrounds of the Very Young) led me to think about whether educators are simply ahead of the curve in the use of virtual environments for educational purposes. While Second Life and other virtual environments for adults have fallen short of anticipated use expectations, those for children have enjoyed unprecedented growth. The success of sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz begs the question that perhaps the generation of students now in elementary and middle school will be open to and expect their educational experiences to exist in virtual worlds. Then again, these students are currently not using virtual worlds for collaborative learning experiences. Instead, these sites exist as a social outlet for children who are often unable to freely travel to visit their friends in person. Will the fascination with virtual environments wane as these same students grow into their late teen years and are able to more freely socialize with their peers? I think this question has yet to be answered.

If our experiments with virtual worlds are teaching us anything, it is perhaps that our course management systems will need to change from the largely asynchronous environments that currently exist to “virtual classrooms” that more closely mirror the face-to-face environment. Such environments would allow for more natural social engagement, easier collaborative learning opportunities, and a better sense of community. In order to make these “virtual classrooms” a reality, educators should begin planning now in order to meet the needs of the generation of students who will be attending college in five to seven years.

The 12 Web Tools of Christmas

If you are like me, you come across dozens, if not hundreds of new websites a year, each offering some new tool or web 2.0 service that is sure to revolutionize the way your surf the web or do your work. Most are just neat little gimmicks or don’t fit into your workflow. However, there are some I’ve run across this year that I found to be quite useful either for personal or professional use. And without further ado, I give you the 12 Web Tools of Christmas.

DropSend1) dropsend.com — Do ever need to email a large file like a high-resolution photo or video clip? Don’t want your email to hang-up for 30 minutes, only to reject the file and force you to start all over? With DropSend, you can send files up to 1 GB with ease. A free account also gives you 250MB of online storage.

Buzzword2) buzzword.com — Buzzword is hands down the best online word processor I’ve ever used. The interface is clean and elegant. Adding images and tables is easy, its collaborative tools are very slick, and it handles pagination and typography better than Google Docs and Zoho. Adobe recently acquired the company that developed Buzzword, so look for them to put their muscle into Buzzword’s future development. (I like Buzzword so much, I even used it to create the first draft of this blog post.)

EditGrid3) editgrid.com — What buzzword is for word processing, EditGrid is for spreadsheets. It’s the most “Excel-like” of the available online spreadsheets and if you are a power Excel user, then EditGrid is the only web app that could possibly meet your needs. Many Excel features, including sorting, charts, auto-fill, cell border, number formatting, cell formatting, import, export, freeze pane, text overflow, auto-fit row/column size, word warp, and cell comments, all work the same in EditGrid as they do in Excel with the exact same keyboard shortcuts. And since EditGrid is a web app, it’s easy to setup cells that retrieve data directly from the Internet. Also promising is EditGrid’s integration with the iPhone.

splashup4) splashup.com — Splashup is the closest thing to a web-based version of Photoshop—at least until Abobe releases the real thing. This little tool covers about 20% of the real Photoshop’s features, but they happen to be the ones I use 80% of the time. It connects directly to flickr and picasa for easy access to your images stored online. I just wished it saved working files as .psd instead of in its own proprietary .fxo format.

Scribd5) scribd.com — I hate websites that contain links to .pdfs and Word .docs. It’s annoying to have to download the file and open it another application in order to get one or two pieces of information. The more I have to repeat this process the more annoyed I get and the more likely I am to abandon the site and go on to something else. Scrbid prevents you from annoying me and other users like me. It allows you to upload your .pdfs and .docs and then provides you a flash document reader that you can embed in your webpage. Think of it as youtube for documents.

VectorMagic6) vectormagic.stanford.edu — This is THE TOOL if you need to convert bitmap images into vector formats. It actually works better than Adobe’s LiveTrace feature that is included in Illustrator. This little utility has allowed me to scale up logos for HD Video with a minimum of fuss.

ZamZar7) zamzar.com — Zamzar is another utility that has proven to be a real lifesaver. If you ever find yourself out of the office and away from your $1000 encoding software, zamzar will be your best friend. Zamzar is a Swiss-army knife of file conversion. It can convert from formats like DOC to PDF, PNG to JPG, and OGG to MP3. Name almost any two file types and Zamzar can convert one into the other. The quality of video file conversion is not the greatest, but when you are in a pinch, it’s good enough.

Miro8) getmiro.com — I love iTunes. It’s great. It’s the primary way I listen to music and find and download podcasts. However, iTunes was initially designed as an audio player and video has just come along for the ride. Imagine an iTunes that was designed from the ground up with video in mind. What would it include? Well, it would play multiple file types including MPEG, Quicktime, AVI, H.264, Divx, Windows Media, and Flash Video. It would handle HD files with ease and efficiency. It would support and download bit-torrent files. It would connect to any publisher with a video RSS feed. Take all this, add in social-site integration with Digg and del.icio.us, and you have Miro.

Box9) box.net — Box.net provides simple and easy to use online file storage and sharing, but’s that not all. You also get password protection for all shared files and integration with web apps like Zoho, and Twitter. Plus, box.net provides one-click posting to WordPress and LiveJournal with more apps and services being added all the time The first GB of storage is free with a wide range of pricing plans for additional storage and bandwidth. A box account is a real asset when you are on the road without a laptop of your own.

TokBox10) tokbox.com — TokBox is an online video chat client that you can embed in any webpage or blog. This has exciting educational potential, since a TokBox video chat session could theoretically be conducted from within a course in Blackboard.

wufoo-copy.gif11) wufoo.com — Wufoo let’s you quickly build pretty web forms and surveys and then embed them into your personal webpage. The data analysis tools look nice too. The free account gives you 3 forms with up to 100 entries a month.

Flock12) flock.com — Flock is the web browser for users devoted to their social networks. If I were a big Facebook user, Flock would be the only browser I would use. Flock’s ability to keep track of your contacts, online accounts, social bookmarks, and stored media and keep them all in easy reach is the best thing to happen to web surfing since tabbed browsing.

And here’s one more tool for a Happy New Year…

Twinetwine.com — What is twine? I have no idea. Apparently it is social bookmarking meets wikis meets YouTube with a layer of artificial intelligence keeping everything just a search tag away. It’s the first true semantic web application! (Whatever that really means.) I recommend you apply for a beta invitation because everyone will be blogging about it next year and you don’t want to be left out of the conversation. It’s 2008, the year of Web 3.0.

Too Cool for School Revisited: Second Life in Higher Ed

“Everything which is technique is necessarily used as soon as it is available without distinction of good or evil. This is the principal law of our age.” —Jacques Ellul, 1954

I just returned from Orlando, where I attended the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning, and can’t stop thinking about Ellul’s views on technology. While I can’t claim to be an expert on his seminal work The Technological Society, my take on him is that he believed the advancement and implementation of technology as inevitable, but that we can choose how we respond and adapt. In essence, tech is here, tech is staying, more tech is coming. What shall we do about it?

Ellul came to mind as I thought about the heated arguments against Second Life I heard at Sloan. Some people are angry—really angry—about the idea of Second Life in education. I found myself wondering what it is about Second Life that’s so threatening. Is it the learning curve? The time and money it takes to develop a viable presence in-world? Or maybe it’s the fear of losing an old and trusted way of teaching in the headlong rush to embrace the new and unproven. No matter. That Second Life and the technology it represents and exploits will be widely implemented in education despite our fears is given. How thoughtfully we’ll use this technology and to what ends are the things we should be researching and debating, not casting stones about in an attempt to forestall the inevitable.

I think I understand the objections some educators have to Second Life. It’s often difficult to point to a sound pedagogical reason for having a Second Life campus. It’s expensive to purchase, develop and maintain an island. It’s still relatively clumsy to navigate and interact in-world. It’s still more a novelty and a pleasant diversion than a proven learning tool. And just how do you justify the expenditure of resources for a virtual campus when your physical campus has its very real needs? Are we going to build virtual campuses just because students think Second Life is cool?

Well, yes. That’s exactly why we will. We will build institutions in Second Life because online learning students in the near future will demand it. They’ll insist on access to it for social connections and interaction and a palpable sense of user presence that smashes the psychological walls of distance; a presence, connection and interaction unmatched by cost per user or ease of use by any other technology currently available. We’ll build them to market our institutions, to strengthen our brands, to compete for students and prestige. We’ll build them for many of the same reasons we fund and field sports teams and build student unions and fitness centers for our on-campus students; because it adds to the social experience of higher education and because that experience has value in and of itself.

And we’ll build them because we must be prepared for the inevitable. The technology that Second Life exploits will become cheaper, more stable, easier to use and impossible to ignore. I’d bet that we’ll see some kind of 3D virtual environment incorporated into Blackboard et al within 5 years. Will we make creative use of its potential? Will we maximize its benefits and mitigate its drawbacks? If we use Second Life and its descendants merely to deliver the same old course content and methodologies, we’ll fail our students and ourselves. We need to think now about how we’ll use this technology, how we’ll exploit its strengths, and how we’ll create new learning methodologies and possibilities for experiences and connections. Second Life is here. The rise of the virtual campus is inevitable. Will we be ready?

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Facebook Makes 40 the New 50

There was an article in the Red Eye on Friday, October 19th about young people not wanting their parents or “creepy old people”—which includes anyone over 40—on the social networking site Facebook. (If you’re not familiar with local Chicago media, the Red Eye is a popular free newspaper. Although it’s unseemly for a librarian to be caught with one, the paper is the perfect length for a relaxing commute read.) There are a number of things that I found interesting about this article, especially as we in higher education examine ways to connect with students where they already are.

The idea that people over 40 are considered “creepy” in the Facebook world begs the question, “How do students really feel about their professors wanting to network with them?” Do students really want their professors in their social networks? Are professors and students really “friends?” I would argue that like everyone else, students need spaces where they are not “at school” the same way those in the working world need spaces where they are not “at work.” In that context, it’s easy to see why crossing these lines can lead to feelings of resentment about the infringement.

This is not to say that social networking technology can’t help build meaningful communities in the online environment. However, I would argue that what we really need to be pushing is for solutions that are integrated into the course management system (whatever that might be) or that were developed for an educational purpose. The focus should be less on what service is being used (e.g. Facebook) and more on what the technology does.

Providing social networking tools as part of the student’s classroom experience (be that online or face-to-face)—but not as part of their social experience—makes a lot of sense. For example, Ning is a free Social Networking tool that faculty can use to create a social network for their class (or perhaps for a cohort). Ning allows instructors to tap into the positive aspects of social networking technology without the baggage of being in a student’s personal space.

While there is something to be said about having everything in the same place, I would argue that we need to have lines in our lives to separate the different components. The hope, of course, is that these lines keep us grounded and more sane!

For more information on the “graying” of Facebook, you can view the original article, “73 and Loaded with Friends on Facebook,” on the New York Times website.

Too Cool for School? Second Life in Higher Ed

Depending on where you stand, education is poised to be elevated into the sublime heights of effortless and ubiquitous real-time virtual interaction and connectivity, or about to be overrun by leering mountebanks as tech-bewitched apostates unbar and swing wide the sacred doors of academia.

At least that’s my take on the current discourse regarding Second Life. I attended the University of Wisconsin’s Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in early August, then the Second Life Community Convention in Chicago August 24-26, and was struck by the divide between those for whom Second Life is just too cool, and those who are left just a bit cold.

The debate seems unnecessarily polarized. At Madison I heard a lot of fear and loathing from some distance educators. Fear that students would fall prey to sexual predators, either by wandering outside of the purportedly safe confines of a virtual classroom or campus, or by the penetration of those defenses by a rogue’s gallery of grifters and charlatans. Fear of embarrassment as naked or hyper-sexualized avatars appear in class. And ultimately, I think, fear of the loss of control, fear of the learning curve to master the technology, and fear of the concomitant workload. For them Second Life is a cold, soulless world far removed from the warm embrace of the classroom and face to face interaction.

The true believers I met and listened to at SLCC have no such qualms. For them SL is super-cool; a democratic and easily accessible new world where anything can and should be visualized and experienced. A world where learners can experiment with identity and experience situations and encounters that would be cost or risk prohibitive elsewhere. Where participants can collaborate and connect more intimately in virtual space than would be permissible or possible otherwise. And a world where the shackles of identity are loosed, role playing becomes an unlimited learning tool, and learning becomes intuitive and fully collaborative, unsullied by the constraints of gender, age, or class.

Just too cool!

I stand somewhere in the middle of this debate. I agree SL is cool, at least the promise of it. Once you get the hang of navigating in-world, which is not intuitive unless you’re a gamer always on the hunt for the best game apps to win real money, there’s a real sense of presence that I don’t experience in asynchronous discussions, chat, or instant-messaging. When I encounter another avatar I experience the same type of social awareness I would in the real world: I’m conscious of proximity, gaze, posture, and the like. Whether this has any purely educational value is certainly up for debate, but if your goal is to increase the sense of connectedness shared by your distance learners you’d be hard pressed to find a more effective tool.

As for collaborative possibilities, one SLCC presenter talked about the virtual fashion design class she created and taught. Fashion students working with peers in art and computer science designed and produced fashions using Photoshop and Second Life, dressed and posed avatars, planned and produced a virtual fashion show, and created portfolio animations of their work. Using the 3D virtual capabilities of Second Life they were able to conceptualize and experience much of the actual work of designing, producing, and presenting fashion collaboratively in a way that would have been impossible given the school’s budget and location. And the instructor stressed that while the class was a collaborative effort, she remained in control of the direction and pace of the workflow.

So yes, it’s cool.

But it’s not the panacea or paradigm shifting agent its disciples declare either. First, it’s not an easy technology to master or fully exploit, especially if you expect to do more than roam around. Plan on devoting six intensive months or more to creating a functioning virtual campus. And that’s with a team of scripters and 3D artists at your disposal. Second, it should be no surprise there’s no shortage of skillful, antisocial nut-jobs that call Second Life home. While I think some of my fellows at the Madison conference were a bit too timid, they raised some valid concerns. Griefers abound in SL, and while you may raise defenses a skilled and determined hacker will find a way around, over or through them. Imagine your class on human sexuality disrupted by pro-life avatars wielding virtual fetuses and you get an idea of the kind of mischief that can occur in-world. And I’m sure lawyers will be kept busy for years to come defining the liability of institutions when their students experience emotional or financial trauma in a course-required Second Life session. Then there are the seemingly regularly scheduled system failures to the SL grid, which Linden Labs owned up to at SLCC with grace and good humor. Finally, while immersive virtual reality is a powerful tool for teaching molecular structure or visiting reproductions of ancient Greece, does anyone seriously think an English lit course is going to benefit by having virtual students sit in a virtual classroom listening to lectures by a virtual instructor? Aside from the novelty of seeing your professor holding court as 7-foot Seductra Maxima in stiletto heels and a rubber mini it’s hard to see any value added.

And I think determining value is what the debate really centers on. There are great ways to exploit SL, and some real problems with the technology as well. I’d be remiss to not mention the digital divide debate that attends SL as an educational tool. There are hardware and broadband requirements that currently preclude a lot of otherwise connected distance learners from participating in Second Life. Those issues will have to be addressed, as well as Linden Lab’s difficulties supplying a robust and dependable platform. But I do think we’re going to see some great things in Second Life or its successors as the bugs get worked out and more content is developed. Personally, I’d like to walk around first-century Pompeii and see if I can outrun Vesuvius’ pyroclastic flow. I’m not sure there’s a lot of real educational value in being able to.

But it’d be cool.

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The Next Best Thing to Your Own Personal Librarian

Daniel’s recent posts focused on social bookmarking tools, which use the power of social networking to help users find websites that suit their interests. On a similar note, I thought I’d share one of my favorite tools, LibraryThing, which serves a similar purpose for books. For those not familiar with this resource, it is an online service that allows people to keep and share their favorite (or least favorite) books. A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. Paid accounts allow you to catalog as many as you wish and start at $10 for a year or just $25 for a lifetime!

Even if you don’t keep your own list of books, LibraryThing is a great resource for finding just the right book for a lazy day at the beach or for a classroom assignment. Its strength lies in the tags that members have provided to categorize their entries. As any librarian will tell you, readers advisory—the practice of recommending books based on a reader’s interests—is a fine art. For example, knowing that you like Harry Potter, a good advisor should be able to tell you that you should also like the Bartimaeus Trilogy. Similarly, a good advisor might be able to recommend esoteric literature with a particular theme, e.g., Chick Lit that takes place in Greece.

My favorite way to find books on LibraryThing is to search using tags (which are the same as key words). If you want to combine tags, you can separate your key concepts with commas. This search is called a tagmash, and it can provide you with some interesting results. For example, a search for World War II fiction retrieves some expected and some unexpected results, including: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden and Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson.

Once you find a title you want to read, you can connect with your local library catalog via the WorldCat link. Before you know it you will be enjoying a new book that you might have otherwise never discovered.

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My Favorite Social Bookmarking Tools (for Now)

In my previous post, Criteria for Evaluating Social Bookmarking Tools, I talked about some of the key features and usability issues I take into consideration when evaluating web-based bookmarking tools. So, which site do I recommend to faculty? That all depends on their needs and level of tech-savvy.

Recommended Tool for Novices: del.icio.us

At the moment, I recommend del.icio.us to novice faculty who I know will view web-based bookmark management as a big leap into the future. It has a pretty small feature set and the most frequently used options are right where you’d expect them to be.

Recommended Tool for More Demanding Users: Furl

For more adept users, I sometimes recommend furl, although I’m not in love with it either. Furl offers three big advantages over del.icio.us:

  • You can select multiple bookmarks at a time and perform major changes to all of them at once (change their tags, delete them, make them private or public, etc.) This makes managing a big batch of imported bookmarks MUCH easier.
  • You can rate bookmarks with a simple five-star system.
  • You can keep archived copies of the sites you bookmark, although I’ve found this feature always sounds better on paper. The first time you try accessing an archived version of a now defunct page with rich media content (Flash, video, or audio), the rich media will probably either be gone or it will be duplicated so that multiple copies of it are embedded on the same page.

Unfortunately, Furl doesn’t offer a groups feature, and neither does BlinkList or most of the other sites I’ve checked out. Keep in mind that I’m talking about groups you create and manage the way an instructor would want to, not “subscription” lists where you get to see every irrelevant link another member added recently or every new bookmark with a particular tag. I also don’t like that Furl doesn’t let you view your tags as a cloud or even as a simple list on the same screen where you view and manage your bookmarks. The Furl interface feels more like a traditional data-management tool than del.icio.us, with everything in neat little rows and columns. This might be comforting for technophobes, but it’s annoying for everyone else.

Recommended Tool for Feature-Hungry Technophiles: Diigo

Diigo has everything I’ve been looking for in a great social bookmarking/collaborative research tool—except ease of use. The tagging system is still buggy (renaming a tag or deleting it can lead to unexpected results), and the interface has some usability issues that I’ve already discussed with one of Diigo’s co-founders. For instance, tag clouds only display the first 18 characters or so of each tag, preferences on how to view your tags revert to default settings every time the page refreshes, etc. Unfortunately, Diigo is still too frustrating to use for me to recommend it to non-tech-savvy educators, but I hope its shortcomings will be resolved soon. If that happens, I’ll become a major Diigo evangelist. If not, I might have to embrace a more bare-bones bookmarking tool like Del.icio.us and search for a separate tool that just handles collaborative research well. Google Notebook is next on my list of tools to check out for that.