Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Five Ways to Mark up the Web/Some Thoughts on Tools

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TechCrunch has a nice post up about the best Web page annotation tools out there, and, of course, I’d only heard and use one of them, Diigo. The others are Fleck, ShfitSpace, Stickis and Trailfire. (Anyone using any of those? Any reviews?) I’m not sure I have my brain fully around the uses of these types of tools (aside from the social bookmarking aspect of Diigo) in terms of marking up the Web. Some vague collaborative applications are floating in there somewhere, but I’d really love to hear ideas about how these could be used from a learning standpoint. As one of the commenters on the post asks,  “Can’t I easily comment about other sites using a Blog?” Probably just have to find some time to play.

On a more general tool note, TechCrunch now lists almost 1,400 apps in it’s company index. 1,400! (So what the heck is Lifeio?) And at the rate this stuff is coming out, it’s easy to see why many people get overwhelmed. I did a workshop in Fort Worth yesterday, and people were pretty much filled up by the 15 or so tools that I showed them. (They loved the the new Google MyMaps feature, btw.) At one point, someone came up and asked “How do you keep up with all of this?” The short answer was that I don’t…I can’t. No one can. But that’s the beauty, and the importance, of the network, I told her. That’s where this whole Connectivism thing makes so much sense. I rely on the trusted sources in the network that I have become a part of for the best tools to filter up. For the best pedagogies to filter up. Just as I’m turning to the network to see if it has any feedback on the tools above.

To me, in a nutshell, that’s the underlying pedagogical shift that when you see it really makes for an “Aha!” moment. We need to think differently, really differently, about the learning structures we build for our students. We need to show them the power of networked learning…because we can.

Comments

  2. Scott Leslie says

    I wrote up a short piece on Trailfire a while back (http://www.edtechpost.ca/wordpress/2007/03/21/trailfire/). I am quite impressed with it; my only complaint (and it is in no way limited to just Trailfire or its ilk) is the lack of identity management incoporated into it. You can choose to view others “marks” on webpages that you view, but it’s an all or nothing game. Someday I would like to see an app which lets you choose to show you only the annotations from people in your skype contacts, or your IM address book, or your Explode network. Or to show both, but visually delineate those from your known network from those outside of it. Anyways, I am still surprised by the lack of uptake in these annotation type tools, they seem quite promising to me.

  3. Patrick says

    Hi Will,

    I might be able to help you with finding a way to use web markup services.

    As you mentioned you can use it for bookmarking purposes.
    2. you can use to share interesting articles or pages with friends or colleagues, but this time with your thoughts and comments in the same interface.
    3. You can use it as a fast way to send a page to a friend (directly from your browser and without the danger your email address -or your friends’- will fall into the wrong hands.
    4. You can use it as a way to see what others are saying about a page (I know, in blogs you can leave a comment., unfortunately not all pages allow comments from its readers). The new Fleck Firefox extension shows you if a page has been flecked by someone, if your interested it opens up a sidebar showing the flecks on that particular page.
    5. If you’re a web-developer you can use it as a way to communicate with your clients about a page but with your remarks where you want them.
    6. Use it as a collaboration tool within a group. Share your notes on webpages within your company, class, project team or whatever group you can think of. Fleck is working on this feature.

    I think all these companies are still at the very beginning of their journey to become ‘a second layer’ on top of the web, owned by the user and not by the webmaster.

    If you have any question or like to have a chatter about this topic, drop me a line… patrick at fleck dot com

  4. Mike says

    Could be a neat way to run a webquest with students–lead them to a url, post questions, get responses, and send them on to the next site. Of course, that would be to model–then have students set up their own quests by posting thougtful responses, summaries and questions on the sticky note.

  5. Martin Mackain-Bremner says

    Lifeio: the new life organiser from attap. coming soon.

    Well, it’s not clear whether this is a new tool for organising my existing life (which usually defies all attempts at organisation) or a tool for organising my new life (which I didn’t know I had, but I’m up for it, on the basis that things can only get better). Either way, I’m left wondering what ‘soon’ actually means (like that sign on the shop door: ‘Back in 5 Minutes’…). For now, though, I can only wait, and while away the time flicking through the other 1,399 apps on TechCrunch – maybe my life needs an organiser??

  7. Marc Meyer says

    How to keep abreast of the web’s exponentially expanding information space is the fundamental question. It’s made even more imperative by the fact that search is becoming debased. Search for something and you WILL find it (and a bazillion other things), whether or not it is true/reliable/desirable.

    Search has led us astray. The answer may well come from the way we filter information in real life (where we can’t search cause its not free, there’s no google for the real world). We start locally with things we trust and bring in sources local to them. I trust the NYT and my friends, and find new things to trust from there. When I want to find out something, THAT’s the set I search through.

    Stickis.com differs from the other annotation tools mentioned here in that it brings to YOU the information from YOUR socially proximate and trusted sources. Wherever you browse the web, it tells you what your personally selected Crowd of friends, bloggers etc have said. This means that you find things dynamically on the web, not on a portal or through a shared but third party url.

    In the blogosphere, similarly, I think that the answer is no longer to read blogs from beginning to end. That’s impossible. Who is caught up on their blog reading? If one were totally caught up, would that even be desirable?

    Instead, we can start from some things one knows and trusts, perhaps techcrunch.com, techememe.com, startupmeme.com (my new favorite) and the use tools which bring related information to me.

    Blogrovr.com does this for blogs. Tell Rovr what blogs you like and wherever you browse on the web, rovr tells you what they’ve said about the page you’re on.

    As Patrick expressed so well, we are in the infancy of this phase, but the transcendental change will come from using all this new computing power available to roll our personal views of the web, a 3 dimensional perspective of information grouped according to what each of us cares about and trusts, different from anybody else’s and under their own control. When you get information from only the places you want, there is no SPAM.

    “Brave new world that has such [web 2.0 tools] in it.” with apologies to Will S.

  8. Tim says

    I’ve been digging diigo lately. It’s a great tool for student research. With Diigo, you can highlight quotes, facts, and other info from a webpage, and when you add the page to your diigo bookmarks, the info you highlighted gets saved with the bookmark. You can also attach sticky notes, comments, share your bookmarks, etc. It’s pretty slick.

    I’ve also used these sticky notes to grade/comment on student online work.

  12. Kraemer says

    Sue R. at Classroom 2.0 posted a great way that her students use del.icio.us to do research using a shared account and tagging. I am an avid Diigo fan, and could see myself using her assignment, but with annotations and highlighting along with tagging and bookmarking.

  13. Randy Rodgers says

    Will,

    I did a review of Fleck and Trailfire awhile back (http://randyrodgers.edublogs.org/2007/01/16/guided-browsing-tools-fleck-and-trailfire/). The guys at Fleck commented on the post and said they are developing some more tools, including the ability to navigate from one notation to another on a different page (a big advantage of Trailfire). I showed some teachers these tools, and they thought they could be useful to help guide student browsing. For example, a teacher could post a focus question on a page or direct them to a particular part of the page, then the link could take them to the next step. It’s not the critical thinking involved in doing one’s own searches and sifting through the information, but it certainly would be more efficient, time wise.

    Tom, why the disdain for Techcrunch? I really appreciate their feed–it has pointed me to some really useful sites.

  17. Andrew Pass says

    Will, I find your idea about waiting to hear things from your trusted network very intriguing. It makes a lot of sense. How do you think about the development of your network to ensure that the entire network does not get blindsided by being tucked away in some crevice of the Internet somewhere?

  18. Angie says

    Will:
    I’ve used Trailfire and so I like it lots. I’m using it to create “Information Trails” for students to follow on certain topics that are related to classroom studies. I’m trying to incorporate these into the ol’ Pathfinders model. Haven’t gone too far yet, just a thought. They’ve added some new features that look promising so for those that haven’t visited it for a while you may want to take a second look. I’m just getting into Diigo.

  20. Jay Hurvitz says

    Ordinarily I’d write that I prefer the benefits of open, networked, learning tools over constricted, group-based, learning. Students who collect materials related to their studies and post them to blogs, to their del.icio.us accounts and the like, can, but aren’t required, to benefit from the similar activities of other students. They can be participative learners, but they don’t have to belong to any particular group (and be fearful that if they don’t contribute an interesting comment somewhere they won’t get a good grade). In some cases, however, relatively small, predefined, groups can have definite benefits. If a class wants to carry on a discussion around a particular article, for instance, though input from outsiders can be helpful, keeping things internal may often be preferable.

    For a discussion of this sort, Diigo can be a wonderful tool. Instead of just commenting on the article under discussion (“I liked it”, and similar highly perceptive remarks), students can highlight the particular passages they found important and comment on those passages. And of course others can respond directly to those same passages. The marginalia that in this way develops around group reading and commenting of this sort can be much more inducive toward learning than a detached discussion. The “groups” function of Diigo allows us to run a “closed” discussion of this sort. So far I’ve seen it happen only to a very limited degree, but there’s still hope.