Digging in to Diigo: Research and Annotation on the Go (5)
Tagging My Work: Zen and the Art of Reflection (VI and VII)
So I need to be honest with myself and others, this is perhaps not the most well thought out project in the world, but it really is not the results that matter but the process. Do not get me wrong, pushing students to grow, especially by fostering studying and researching skills which by and large are not a priority for many educators given the current focus upon testing and scores, is especially critical. I cannot recall the number of times I heard my CT mention how underprepared many students now were when they entered his classroom, and how he continually hears from teachers in the high school how they feel students are underprepared when they enter their classrooms. So fostering student growth is important, but the focus here should be on whose student growth? Theirs or mine? While I certainly am not happy with the outcome of my work and the assessment thereof it does nonetheless help me as I prepare and shape instructional strategies for the future. But before I can look at the future I would like to consider the use of Diigo in the 3rd period classroom, reflect upon what I did and then offer some ideas on how to improve my work for the future.
There were any number of ways I might have gone about teaching media and public policy, but given my penchant for technology, and of course this particular assignment, it seemed like a perfect fit. Now, while planning this first unit my focus was constantly and always upon pushing students. I had seen then, with Mr Longstreet, learn the facts but I wasn’t sure about their awareness of critical thinking skills and I certainly had seen very little evidence that students understood the implications and ramifications of their work. Namely, I was looking for students to build upon their knowledge and start applying information to different situations and settings. Not only did I want them to transfer what they knew, knowledge-wise, but my overall hope was they would be able to transfer skills as well.
The first Diigo assignment then was designed as part of the larger meta activitiy, modeling with information what I wanted them to learn about skills. As I’ve hinted at above it did not quite worked like I had wanted. Moreover, the use of Diigo was going to be the first real foray I made into technology in the classroom. While I had mentally prepared myself for such a fact I am not sure I was truly cognizant of how difficult it might be. Not only did I suffer a slight setback when I couldn’t get the students to install the toolbar on the computers and had to resort to using Diigolet – which indeed was time-consuming as some of the students noted in the surveys – but I also didn’t full prepare myself for the neediness of the students when they apparently got lost. As such, as you have seen above, I started to prepare step-by-step checklists and screencasts as resources for students to use to help themselves. In the end though, those additional resources were underused. I found myself still walking around, helping to put out fires, so to speak.
Returning then to the planning of the first Diigo activity, I was left with the initial concern whether it was feasible to use Diigo in the classroom, or whether I would have to revert to a low-tech version of the same activity: having students find and read and clip articles out of newspapers. The problem with this particular way of doing things is newspapers are becoming by and large alien to these students. Even their own school newspaper is no longer printed but solely made available to students online. The printed press is not something that terribly connects to their lives, so by starting with media they know – TV and the Internet – I am making the connection between media and policy that much easier. During the Concept Diagram activity I did in class with students, I was the one who had to suggest newspapers or the press as an example of media; electronic media rules the day.
So the value added to using Diigo had more to do with the medium than anything else. Of course, the additional value I saw in Diigo had to do with the possibility of connecting something that is digital – social bookmarking, highlighting and Sticky Notes – with something that is analog – using a highlighter, underlining and taking notes. My primary act during all of this was as chief instigator. I introduced the tool, walked students through how to do things and then let them work on their own. In part I also wanted to encourage and provide students with a chance to be self-starters. As you might guess this worked to varying degrees. I did my best to monitor their work, help students with they had questions, but I provided very little feedback, and as I have noted above, my focus on assessing their learning was not so much on the content but on the process. Process, after all, does matter. Unfortunately I was largely hampered by the number of students clamoring for my attention and the fact that I have not yet found a way to clone myself so I can be in more than one location at a time.
For the second assignment I shifted my attention from an open-ended environment to a closed one. Sure I told students to use specific news sites as their sources for their Diigo research, but it was by and large open to whatever they could find. And I’ve discovered specificity is the key. As such, having students focus on just one site, and a series of hyperlinked pages made it easier for them to find information and participate in the activity. This time rather than engage them in meaning-making I was focusing more upon summarizing or paraphrasing. And I must be completely honest, I did not succeed. Because of this lack of success, again as I have already noted, for assessment I focused more on the process then the content. This in itself is not a bad thing, after all, the point of the Digital Humanities Project itself is more about the process of supporting student learning and growth through Web 2.0 technologies, but is it really fair to grade students on the process and not on the content, or vice versa? Can they ever truly be separated? The problem I see with this particular activity is that it should have required an additional layer of information and process and thus content, and that would have been how to read a text and analyze it for information. Especially the website I had chosen which contained a number of historical documents. Here then is the first hint at what I might do I the future: employ a SCIM-C framework so that students have some experience reading and then analyzing the material prior to any sustained paraphrasing.
On the flip side of all this, though, was I felt I supported student efforts better here. At TJMS students’ last period of the day, at least for 7th graders, is a directed study. One day after this activity I had as many as 52 of 82 students come see me for assistance during directed study, to work on the Diigo project. And certainly that is more problematic than 20 students all clamoring for attention, it was a more relaxed environment where the structure of the classroom and time was not as great a factor and I could spend 2 to 5 minutes with individual students or groups of students helping them work through Diigo and its several quirks and kinks.
Now, it could be convincingly argued that using Diigo for this type of research added nothing to the project as a whole. Students already had a packet full of information, which many of them did not actually bother to read. So I could have better spent my time walking students through that packet of information, have them do the underlining, highlighting and annotating there. But once again, we are operating in a digital world. And while the immediate skills students might need have to do with note taking with pen and paper, the skills required for future research will undoubtedly require the Internet and computer access. Moreover, and again something I have mentioned before, is the idea that Diigo serves as a self-generated social-networked aggregator. Students are not only taking and creating notes for themselves but they are making their own thoughts and ideas available to other students. In some ways it is not unlike wiki creation, but perhaps more social and less formalized.
I would like to conclude this analysis and review with some additional thoughts and random ideas via the below video.
Unorthodox History 
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