Slides for today's HEA #tagginganna workshop

Here we go...

Tagginganna at Lilly West

Here are the slides Mark and I will be using at the workshop at Lilly West (#lillywest12) and, thanks to Alex, by the time we get there they should even be finished! The guts of the workshop though will be two activities centred around 2 printed out texts to simulate the online environment before we introduce it. You can find out more on the dissemination part of the Google site that I've put together. Thanks to Zara, Marta, Carol and Zoe for test running this for us.

Lilly West

Next week Mark and I are going to the Lilly West conference in California to present our (and Alex's) #tagginganna project. I've been blogging about it as we've been going along but I thought it would make it easier to showcase the project if I made a sepearate site. I've been tinkering with Google sites for a while (easy, free and getting better) so I thought I'd make a Google site for the project. I've previously used Google sites for making sites for the local cub and scout groups (I might put these up as templates on Google sites when I get the chance) but they were never used in the end, so it's nice to have an opportunity to use it for real. The site isn't finished yet but it should give you the general idea. Feedback and suggestions very welcome.

And while I'm here, things that were handy for making it:

• a colour picker - I used this chrome Eye Dropper (free)
• a photo editor - I used pixlr.com (free)
• a drawing tool - Kathy did the tagginganna tag on Brushes for iPad (costs but Skitch would have done it for free)

Pomona here we come!

Digress.it screencasts

In an attempt to breathe life back into our beleaguered tagginganna project, Mark, Alex and I met a couple of weeks ago to try and kick start it again. It's been difficult with each of us doing at least two jobs but we're hopeful that we can progress things a bit further this semester. One part of the project is to develop some 'how to' screencasts for people who might want to use the Digress.it platform for similar purposes, so with that in mind Alex and I recording four rough and ready screencasts to explain how to:

• registering on Digress.it
• edit settings
• create an about page
• publish and schedule posts

And here they are. Like I say, a bit rough and ready but hopefully useful guidance for someone who wants to start using the platform.

Update on developments for tagginganna

Apparently someone suggested on twitter last week that Alex, Mark and I might be keeping our tagginganna project secret. I just checked my blog and the last time I blogged about it was on 7 September when Alex presented at ALTC and before that it was July so I can quite understand why it might be thought we were being secretive. Unfortunately the reason is much more mundane; we've just been busy. The autumn term was a bit of a write-off for me because of the acting-up, but we did make some progress using a new tool from Birmingham City University's Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES). This is how they describe the tool.

The wiki interface supports the collaborative close reading and analysis of texts, by allowing researchers, teachers and students to attach comments to individual words or phrases within these texts or to whole texts. These comments take the form of analyses or interpretations, and can generate intra- and inter-textual links.

The 'Wiki without a name' from RDEUS has been an exciting development and one we'll be reporting on when we have more data - but feedback from students so far has been very positive and we're looking forward to testing it further.

Meanwhile, we commissioned Eddie Tejeda, the creator of Digress.it to do some development work on the site to make it more suitable for our needs. We are in the process of testing the developments but the items we requested were as follows:

• tag comments
• search comments
• layered tables of contents

Which seem to be nearly there. More to follow...

Tagginganna at ALTC

This presentation is Alex and Jen's work, but I'm putting it here for completeness, and because Mark and I are the other two members of the project team. We're presenting it at ALTC tomorrow (although as I'm setting this post as a delayed publication - that should read 'today').

Tagginganna on Prezi

Wallwisher

Just wondering if this will be useful after Alan's suggestion. Anyone used Wallwisher before? It looks handy but not had any experience of it.

Tagginganna project plan

Our ingenious #tagginganna project plan ('our' = Mark, Alex, JayJay and me)

Digress.it developments

Back in April Mark and I went to the University of Lincoln to chat to Joss Winn about our Tagginganna project, and more specifically about digress.it ('a WordPress plugin that offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text). It was really useful to hear from Joss some background to digress.it, including:

• how The Institute for the Future of the Book kicked things off ('a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens' - isn't 'think-and-do tank' a brilliant term)
• how Commentpress then developed ('an open source theme and plugin for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text')
• how Joss and Tony Hirst set up Write to Reply using Commentpress to allow people to comment on public reports
• how if:book developed out of Institute of the Future of the Book using Commentpress
• how Eddie Tejeda, who has been pivotal in the software developments for all of the above then wrote digress.it
• and how Cornell Univeristy and the New York Public Library are using digress.it in some fascinating projects (those links are to the projects not the institutions)

In addition to finding out more background to digress.it the other aim of our meeting with Joss was to discover how likely it was that we could influence the development of digress.it to make it more suitable for the the purpose for which we are wanting to use it (see Tagginganna progress). The developments we need are the ability for readers to tag comments and search comments, and the option for administrators to choose a layered table of contents (to allow for more 'chapters'). Joss thought all these would be things that would be useful to the evolution of digress.it more generally so said that Eddie would probably be willing to develop them (and clearly the best placed to do so). And as it has taken so long to recruit a Research Assistant to the project (it still hasn't happened yet) we have money in our project budget we can redirect to opensource software development rather than spending the majority on a Research Assistant.

So on Monday I had a Skype call to San Francisco with Eddie and explained our requirements and he was very positive. They'll be a major upgrade of digress.it in the next couple of weeks, after which we can start work on the detail. And by which time we will also have some exciting news regarding the Research Assistant. In fact, we hope to have that by Monday...

It's going to work after all.

Tagginganna update

Mark, Alex and I had a meeting on Tuesday to try and revive our somewhat beligured tagginanna project. So far things have been a bit stalled, largely because of problems convincing Personnel that we do actually have the funding and the approval to recruit a part-time research assistant. Anyway, it finally looks as if we might be nearly there with the RA so hopefully things will start zipping along soon, which means we need to have a bit more of a plan...

On the upside the limited trials we've attempted have worked quite well (apart from trying to use Diigo with Firefox portable on a USB stick - which just kept freezing - and I'm still not sure why). Digress.it has proved a little tricky to set up (and is interfered with by a Blackboard frame) but from the perspective of the students who have been using it it's been brilliant. Mark has, however, noticed a tailing off of contributions, which in many ways is no surprise, but we are trying to think of what the causes of decreased contribution are and what we should do about it. Some of the causes might be:

• novelty wearing off
• technical problems
• loss of momentum as the module progresses
• lack of participation of some leading to lack of participation of others (discussion needs a critical mass)

In terms of what we should do about these issues, other than ironing out the technical problems, some well-thought through e-tivities should help, as should having a research assistant on the case to give the project the time it deserves. When the RA does start then figuring out how the technology can help facilitate the pedagogical aims of the project will be a key task, as will a thorough evaluation of the available tools.

We will make this project work!

Firefox portable, diigo and tagginganna

I'm currently involved in a project called Text Tagging: Searchable Reader-Commentary on e-Texts, and a Pedagogy of Implicit and Explicit Meaning. Otherwise known as tagginganna - which I've blogged about several times before. The tools we are currently experimenting with are digress.it and diigo. Digress.it is proving relatively easy to use, from a student perspective at least, because it doesn't require users to download anything or sign up for anything. Diigo, on the other hand requires users to both create an account and install a toolbar. Creating an account in diigo is easy enough to do but installing a toolbar, when your students are forced to work on Internet Explorer 7 and don't have permissions, is more difficult. Getting the diigo toolbar officially installed across campus will take months and will also require evidence that diigo is useful. So how do we pilot software that we can't install? I think we've got round the problem by using Firefox portable on a USB stick. This is how:

• I downloaded Firefox portable and saved it to a USB flash drive;
• I then used these clever instructions to add Flash to Firefox portable (by default it doesn't come with it) just in case we need it at some point;
• then I opened Firefox potable from the USB stick and added the diigo Firefox addon;
• then I set the home page of Firefox portable to the site I want the students involved in the project to view first.

I've tried it out on a student account and it worked fine - Firefox opens up, Flash works and users are prompted to sign in to diigo or create an account via the tool bar Diigo - sign in button - which is handy.

I think it should work fine. Have I missed anything?

Tagginganna progress

I'm feeling rather stalled on this project after an initial flurry of activity and the good news that we got the funding, so I'm hoping that forcing myself to write a blog post about it might focus my thoughts (it will also mean that the slightly inane Twitter fixed my dishwasher post isn't sitting at the top of my blog any more).

I've written a couple of times before about our tagginganna project and there is a growing list of items that we've tagged on delicious http://delicious.com/tag/tagginganna (there's also a tagginganna friendfeed group that's aggregating everything).

The project team

The project team is made up of Mark Rawlinson, Alex Moseley and me. So when I refer to 'we' that's who I mean.

Title

The project is officially called Text Tagging: Searchable Reader-Commentary on e-Texts, and a Pedagogy of Implicit and Explicit Meaning - so you can see why we're shortening it.

The problem we're trying to address

Reading novels takes a long time and a good discussion about a long novel takes much longer than the time available in one tutorial. Additionally, when students are reading a novel they are expected to make the meaning of the narrative explicit (in order to be able to discuss it in a tutorial) but during their private reading they are experiencing the richness of the text's language implicitly. There is therefore often a disconnect between the meaning of a text and their experience of it. Add to this the fact the experience of the text is 'available as a rapidly diminishing memory' and you begin to see some of the problems faced by both tutors and students in reading and talking about novels.

The solution we think might work

This is best explained by quoting directly from our bid document.

Text tagging (marking up textual elements, and adding searchable tags which make the implicit explicit) is a procedure for bridging the gap between narrative experience and narrative analysis, between private study and seminar discussion. Readers could share an online text, and through individual acts of tagging (either concurrent with the initial reading, or retrospectively, in a guided rereading) contribute to a social network of interpretive acts which can be retrieved by searching the text and/or the tags. The social network of tags is a meaning map of the narrative under study, and crucially, a map that always takes discussion back to the territory of the text being analysed (discussion invariably tends to abstraction where the evidence is as apparently inaccessible as the fine details of a very long book).

Project aims

The aims of the project are:

• to test the pedagogical benefits of tagging and commenting on a shared online work of fiction (Anna Karenina) by a small group of third year undergraduates, and using this collaborative markup as a discussion point in face-to-face seminars: this is focussed on making meaning explicit;
• to test the pedgogical and community-development benefits of sharing comments and tags across multiple cohorts, focusing on the new meanings and affordances offered by pervasive and incremental tags;
• to determine the technical suitability of a number of freely available tagging/commenting tools to support the above activity;
• to test the pedagogical benefits of tagging and commenting on a shared e-book within the BlackBoard VLE, by a small group of distance-learning postgraduates;
• to develop one or more pedagogical models for the use of tagging and commenting on online texts within a higher education context;
• to report on the technical suitability of a number of freely available tools and platforms to enable pedagogically-effective tagging and commenting within a higher education context;
• to form the basis for discussions with publishers (initially Routledge) on the use of e-books within academic courses.

We need a researcher

The majority of the funding for the project will be spent on a research assistant. So if you're interested or know anyone who might be - please get in touch.

Right, now I've reminded myself what the project is about I'm off to have another think about digress.it and Diigo.

How to tag anna

I wrote a few weeks ago about our tagginganna project. Well, it's moving along nicely (slowly but nicely). I mentioned that we were either going to use Diigo or digress.it. If you're interested you can join our Diigo tagginganna group and then comment on our copy of Anton Chekhov.s Ward No. 6. We'd also like you to comment using digress.it which you can do at http://stujohnson.digress.it/

And if you need a bit of guidance...

Diigo

This is how you comment to our tagginganna group in Diigo

digress.it

This is how you comment via digress.it

Over to you!

Tagginganna

A  few weeks ago Mark Rawlinson (@nosnilwar) in the School of English put a project idea to me. Months ago he got me reading Anna Karenina (because I'd never heard of it!) and since then he's been thinking about a project related to it. As most other people in the world seem to know (I didn't), Anna Karenina is quite a long book, more than 900 pages, the problem that Mark commonly experiences in tutorials is where students can't quite remember where they read something. They have experienced reading a book (often a very long book) but they can't pinpoint in the text where a particular theme, or idea, or event can be found. It therefore usually relies on the expertise and knowledge of the tutor to remember key sections for them. Mark's suggestion was to task students with reading a paper copy of a book in the conventional way but then ask them to tag or comment on an online version of the book. The tagging and commenting would need to be visible to a defined group and, importantly, searchable.

Rather than test the project out on 900 pages of Tolstoy, Mark suggested that we start with a short story, so we're using Ward no. 6 by Anton Chekhov (both this and Anna Karenina, and many others are available via Project Gutenberg).

Alan blogged about the project after an early meeting a few weeks ago, since then I've been thinking more about what tools to use for the tagging and commenting bit. Two tools seem like they might work:

1. http://www.diigo.com
2. http://digress.it

Diigo

Diigo's strap line is 'Highlight and Share the Web!' and describes itself as 'a powerful research tool and a knowledge-sharing community'. Alan didn't like diigo but it's growing on me (not least since I connected it up to my delicious account, but that's another post). The groups feature is the bit that looks like it's going to be the most useful for this project, and I've created a tagginganna group (which you can request to join if I haven't invited you already) and put the text of Ward no. 6 on a Wordpress site (am I allowed to do that?). I haven't tested it yet because no one has yet joined the Diigo group - so come and join in the fun!

Digress.it

Digress.it 'is a plugin for WordPress that lets you comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text'. The blurb looks great (although I've had some issues with dodgy script):


I don't have WordPress downloaded and hosted so I'm using Digress.it to host the project instead. You can find it here and, once you have a digress.it account (which looks confusingly similar to a WordPress account but is actually different), you can start commenting.

So, please help!