Eller College of Management The University of Arizona. MIS 111 Freshman Honors Showcase

Transcription

1 Eller College of Management The University of Arizona MIS 111 Freshman Honors Showcase Diigo: The Research Tool of the Century Chelsea Reynolds, Julie Grenier, Ivana Martinez, Amy Stalkfleet Fall 2015

2 Executive Summary Diigo is a social bookmarking product that provides knowledge-seeking individuals the ability to consolidate information for research and sharing purposes. Our team hopes to achieve incorporation of this research mechanism into the academic lives of students and faculty at the University of Arizona. Diigo is marketed as a web tool in which customers can utilize regularly to access their personal database of saved content. Customers can obtain Diigo from any ios or Android device, and on all browsers with downloadable extensions. The application offers a variety of pricing packages, ranging from free to professional, as well as offering an educator package. Some of the important features include bookmarking, tagging, highlighting, outlining, archiving, annotating, and sharing. As a small, private company, the employees are dedicated to their influence on the technological expansion in the classroom, as well as their customers satisfaction. In regards to the classroom setting, our team believes that Diigo would be especially useful in the English department at the University of Arizona. Daisy Pitkin, a professor in the Honors College and Creative Writing Department, believes that Diigo could be well suited to improve the quality of HNRS 222: Explorations of Creative Writing. Due to the vast amount of annotating non-fiction essays and producing creative compositions, our team informed her of the many ways how effective Diigo could operate for her and her students. By using Diigo s tools instead of conventional note-taking, her class activities can be modified to better serve the students technological disposition without sacrificing the integrity of the learning experience here at the university. Although the English department is narrow for the application to be applied, Diigo is easily transferrable and useful for any subject or division that requires expansive research, essays, and reading. The feasibility of Diigo s application in the classroom clearly represents how effortless researching for class projects and essays can be. Majority of students have the access to technology and internet, the only requirements for Diigo to operate. With the University of Arizona s free Wi-Fi, students can access their personal library and their compilation of resources. Help.Diigo.com is a tool that anyone can use if they have questions on the application s functionality and malfunctions. Other than the price of the premium account, there are no additional economic costs in the use of the application. In terms of the legal assessment of Diigo, most aspects covered;; the application does not violate any users privacy rights established in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In addition, Diigo is prohibited from divulging any personal information to third parties regarding any work completed using the website s server. The application does not impose impassable barriers for people with certain disabilities. Next steps for the application focuses on gaining a more informed audience to achieve successful implementation. Our group plans on holding informational sessions to make known the various features that can enhance students research processes. In conclusion, Diigo is easy to use, easy to access, easy to implement. It has the potential to revolutionize and transform research-based papers, theses, and academic life. Our team highly recommends the University of Arizona, and all universities for that matter, to adopt Diigo in their academic technological culture. i

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction..1 Product Assessment Overview.1 Proposed Instructional Activity..3 Feasibility and Design Assignment..7 Next Steps/Future Work 12 Conclusion..13 Bibliography 14 Appendix.15 TABLE OF FIGURES Table 1: Account Type Comparison.iii Table 2: Instructor Benefits. iii Image 1: Teacher Console Preview iii ii

4 Table 1: Account Type Comparison Table 2: Instructor Benefits Features Free Account Educator Account # Bookmarks Unlimited Unlimited # Highlights PDF Annotation No 50 Number of Outliners 5 20 Private Groups 1-3 members members Ads Free No Limited Social Privileges No Yes Teacher Console No Yes Image 1: Teacher Console Preview iii

5 Introduction Communication and technology have continued to show promise and value in a classroom setting, thus adopting and developing software and applications to enhance learning continues to be a priority for universities and other learning institutions. Our team was introduced to the web product Diigo, a downloadable browser add-on and social bookmarking engine that works as a personal research storage hub, and given the task of integrating the technology into the classroom while at the same time enhancing the content of the class. We believe that assimilating this socialbookmarking technology into the classroom can prove beneficial to knowledge-seeking individuals both in a classroom setting and in their own personal lives because social bookmarking applications allow users to organize their own personal bookmarks (digitallyspeaking.pbworks.com) and then share them with anyone over the Internet. By adopting Diigo into investigation and research processes our team hopes that class instruction will become more cohesive with recent and ever-present technological advances as well as enhance the overall learning experience. Product Assessment Overview Product Characteristics Diigo s slogan is Your Learning, Simplified (diigo.com). Diigo serves as an easy accessible tool for organization, storage, and sharing all in one account. The value proposition for Diigo s customers is the easy access anytime and anywhere of online resources, the ability to annotate web pages and PDFs, organizing links and references to structure their research, and having the option to share their research with anyone 1

6 they wish. Diigo s goal is to simplify learning for everyone. Using this online application, customers can save valuable time by having all of the information they need in one location and organized for them. Furthermore, if customers pay a premium for their accounts instead of using the free trial, they are guaranteed more access to the available resources to make their research easier and quicker. Market Assessment Diigo is aimed at students, teachers, and professionals alike. Anyone who needs to compile information for research can utilize the application to boost their productivity or share with classmates, teachers, colleagues, or friends. Overall, the product is mostly directed for educational use due to the fact that information mostly collected for research projects, essays, and proposals will be used for academia. Over nine million people are using Diigo. Diigo offers a free account, with unlimited bookmarking and notes, but with limited social privileges and a set amount of outliners, highlights, and images. However, there are multiple premium packages. The social account is $7 per year with no advertisements, unlimited social privileges, and access to more, but limited, outliners, highlights, and images. The standard account is $40 per year or $5 each month and offers unlimited on all features and includes access to annotate 100 PDF files. The professional account is the standard plan, but with unlimited PDF annotation and unlimited group, and is $59 per year or $6 each month. For educators, there is a teacher plan that is free and offers many useful tools. Unfortunately, there are no student discounts currently available for the premium plans. 2

7 Company Assessment The company is supported by the freemium business model. The product is provided free of charge, but money is charged for extra features and functionality. Customers that enjoy their free account and wish to upgrade will spend the extra money to get the full experience that the application has to offer. The customers who pay for subscriptions are Diigo s primary source of revenue. Diigo is a privately owned company with twelve employees who have expertise in software development, marketing, education, and investment management areas. Corporate headquarters are located in Reno, Nevada. To date, Diigo 5.0 s most important features are the bookmarks, highlights, and annotations coupled with easy accessibility and capability to share. Customers can store their saved webpages forever, regardless of the status of the original source, which is important because they have reassurance that their collected information is never going anywhere. PC and Mac users, on any browser, can access the application. Android and ios users are also able to use the application from their phone or ipad. Browser add-ons, extensions, mobile and desktop apps, and web services aid in delivering the product. Proposed Instructional Activity Diigo s versatility applies to all areas of a researcher and creator s life, but our team believes the usability of the product in a classroom setting is especially exceptional. When an instructor registers for the website with their verified educator information, their account is given special privileges that are specific to a teacher s 3

8 needs. One of these special features is known as the Teacher Console, where a professor can create accounts for each of their students and add them to a virtual group for each unique class they are using Diigo with. Through this Teacher Console and group creation advantage, the instructors are able to both provide content their students can access on their individual Diigo accounts as well as view what each of the student s are doing-therefore granting them the ability to assess how often and how responsibly students are using the Diigo homework resources. The educational areas where our team feels the product Diigo could be best utilized are identified as the research, modifying/marking, compiling, and sharing markets of academia. Because English classes and Creative Writing classes in general require an ample amount of researching, compiling information, and outlining the facts into a logical sequence in order to start writing an essay or novel, the Creative Writing discipline s academic material is very well suited for the Diigo product and all of the functionality that the product offers. Specifically, the HNRS 222 class at the University of Arizona known as Explorations in Creative Writing taught by Daisy Pitkin that focuses on nonfiction work creation is a favorable match with the Diigo product because her teaching style and types of assessments used in her class-such as having her students create their own manuscripts and requiring them to read and annotate a multitude of essays-are highly applicable to the tools and functions of Diigo. The final manuscript she requires her students to write based both on the student s interest/thoughts on a specific topic as well as nonfiction information about the topic is a great example of how a graded class assessment could incorporate the Diigo technology into its completion requirements;; the instructor could easily dictate an exact number of sources or number 4

9 of annotations necessary during the research phase of the manuscript-writing process and use Diigo to monitor if these expectations are being met. Daisy Pitkin s Explorations of Creative Writing class in the English department (which also serves as an Honors-level Tier II Arts general education requirement in order to expose the student population to creative writing opportunities) is an appropriate candidate for adopting the technology components of the Diigo product because the class mainly consists of reading and annotating nonfiction essay works, researching topics for student essay creations, and editing fellow student s writing during a workshop phase of class in order to help edit and improve the piece. The bookmarking, annotating, outlining, highlighting, and sharing mechanisms provided by the product would be incredibly helpful throughout all of these phases of the writing class and increase the efficiency and depth of the reading/editing while decreasing the chances of student s being unable to fulfill the assignment due to printing constraints or a disappearance of materials. For example, there are many times in Pitkin s class when the students are required to print out up to five essays of varying length, annotate them, and come to the two-and-a-half-hour class prepared to discuss all of the ideas of each essay with your fellow classmates. With the use of Diigo, our team suggested that instead of going through so much effort and environmentally-unfriendly amounts of paper to make comments on five essays, the professor could post the essays with her own specific comments already written in the margins on her instructor-specific account that every student in her class is able to access, highlight and sticky-note the areas where they found something interesting or important in the text. Both the teacher and other students 5

10 could then share the markings and opinions with their fellow peers in the classroom and outside the classroom over the internet. This modified activity would utilize the greatest features of Diigo such as the ability to read articles, annotate them directly on the webpage, and share their work with others in their specific class group-at the same time improving the efficiency of the required reading work for the class and allowing for more time and flexibility to complete the assignment and discuss the contents of each essay with the other students before the classroom setting. The activities and uses of Diigo that our team has proposed for Pitkin s Creative Writing class are modifications and improvements on processes already in existence. The practices of the class are valuable and beneficial to the students in Pitkin s class by providing them with insight on what a well-written essay looks like and how to create their own wonderful, factually-correct masterpiece. Our team doesn t wish to remove any of that educational content;; rather, those practices could be combined with Diigo s adaptable services in order to facilitate the homework and advance the overall class content both technologically and intellectually. Diigo allows everyone involved in the learning process-teachers and students alike-to broaden their ideas on the class subjects and gain a deeper understanding of the information because of more intuitive navigation and integration. All in all, the instructional outcome of adding Diigo to the classroom is a greater rate of participation by the students. Technology is an undeniable and unavoidable aspect of education in today s modern world, but despite popular belief computers and the internet don t have to be the destruction of education. The organization and functionality of Diigo s researching, outlining, annotating, and sharing elements will 6

11 engage students on a new, deeper level with the content they re investigating as well as allow for a facilitated mode of learning with computer devices that at times can seem intimidating and overwhelming. An instructor adoption of this product would benefit an instruction portion of a class not only by eliminating the chances of lost or forgotten paper readings but also allowing the teaching to continue outside of the classroom for students who may not understand the topics in the short time they have hearing it in person. The easy and constantly available access to homework assignments will enable students to complete more of their required work and retain more of the lessons taught by the course, leading to a more thorough understanding of the material and subsequently better performance on exams and other high-value assignments. Feasibility and Design Assignment When deciding which class could most effectively adopt Diigo, we considered classes that could be characterized as research, reading, and writing-heavy. As our group discussed different candidates, we settled upon Explorations of Creative Writing under the instructor Daisy Pitkin. After our presentation of the application, she had positive feedback. While discussing the program she even had thoughts on how this would apply to other classes she teaches outside of the Explorations in Creative Writing, including the honors thesis, and her own personal work outside of school. Thus she opened our eyes to what other possibilities the product could be applied. The positive reaction gave us confidence that this product could be applied to this classroom and beyond, given the teacher s excitement and quick ability to apply this to other disciplines. We also felt more confident that this category of classroom and genre could 7

12 fit our product well. Even with the teacher s questions about the product, we were able to satisfy her inquiries, another confidence booster that the product has answered and anticipated any confusion that could occur. The technical requirements for using Diigo are simple. It requires an internet connection, that s it! When you create an account you are asked to download the chrome, or whichever browser of your choice, extension. Once downloaded, it should only take a couple of seconds, you will see the Diigo logo on your toolbar when you open a web browser on your computer. Diigo is available for Mac, Windows, PC, Android, IOS, too. You also have the option to use Diigolet which requires no downloading or extension. It does not offer the full variety of tools the extension does but it has the necessary basics such as highlighting, bookmarking and sticky notes. Diigo has an app which is used for iphones, ipads, and Android. Actually using Diigo is even easier. Say you are researching something on a website or reading some interesting article online and you want to highlight a phrase that could be part of your research or a quote you could use in your paper, just select the text with your cursor and a pop up will appear right next to your cursor giving you the option to highlight it or add a sticky note to it (for notes) or search it in your personal Diigo library and google (help.diigo.com). Diigo does not interrupt your learning or reading, it only enriches it. Regardless of the easy to use program, if anyone should find difficulty in using Diigo there are many resources for help and assistance. The help.diigo.com is the company s support site where they explain in detail the process of downloading the extension for your certain browser, how to use the extension with your research and other helpful advice mixed in (help.diigo.com). A quick search in Google brings up video 8

13 tutorials on how to use Diigo, articles on digital device and tool review websites about Diigo, among other things. Besides online resources for tutorials, teachers could easily have the option of giving a five-minute lecture on the usability of Diigo. When researching or just exploring online, Diigo is ready-to-use anytime you want it. To annotate, highlight, add a sticky note, tag, bookmark, or archive takes a simple click of a mouse. There are four accounts available to be started with Diigo, all with separate cost margins and varying levels of offered tools. At the most basic level, you can choose at the set up for your account, the free version which offers unlimited bookmarks and notes, 5 outliners, 500 highlights, and 100 images. Next is the social account which encompasses 10 outliners, 2000 highlights, 500 images, no ads, and any new developments will be automatically added for $7 per year. Thirdly, the standard account covers the tools of the social plan with the additional unlimited images and outliners, and 100 annotated pdfs all for $40 per year or $5 per month. Lastly, the professional account includes the standard plan with unlimited pdfs and groups for $59 per year or $6 per month. In addition to these plans, there is an Educators plan that comprises of different benefits similar to the free social plan with certain perks like in the standard and professional accounts. It s possible to add under the Educator account a free student account that can be managed by the instructor;; this would work in a single classroom setting. For incorporating Diigo into a large institution such as a university, there is an option called the Diigo Education Domain which allows the IT administrators the authority to regulate and implement accounts with students, staff, and faculty (diigo.com). 9

14 Diigo can be accessed from any smartphone or computer, so long as there is an internet connection, but this is the only problem that could possibly present itself when using Diigo. However, if the app were to be inaccessible for a prolonged period of time, a student would need to manually accomplish what Diigo could digitally achieve. When it comes to evaluating a legal assessment of the Diigo app, most bases are fully covered. Diigo in no way, shape, or form interferes with the students rights that are established in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law enacted in 1974 that is also known as FERPA. As the University of Arizona s Office of the Registrar s website explains, FERPA is the federal law that governs the rights of students and institutional responsibilities with respect to student records ( Diigo has the option of choosing separate privacy settings specifically designed for students in order to ensure that no information regarding their educational records is disclosed without their permission. They comply with all of the rules established in FERPA and respect the need to keep students data including admissions and biographical information, papers, course schedules, evaluations, and academic activities completely confidential. Unfortunately, Diigo does not currently offer an auditory alternative for students with a visual impairment when it comes to the accessing of its information, though there is absolutely no impediment to students with auditory or minimal motor disabilities. In regards to students that suffer from any type of a cognitive learning disability, Diigo presents no more of a challenge than any other websites or apps used by University of Arizona students, such as Desire2Learn (D2L). The university already requires that students with any form of disability contact and inform them of their special needs in 10

15 order to be able to equally and fairly accommodate them. In addition, Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that universities make their websites easily accessible for people suffering from disabilities as it was determined that providing special accommodations simply in a physical aspect was not enough. The University of Arizona s Web Developers Group explains that is essential to make sure we are fully cooperating with a person of special needs because about 20% of the population of the United States suffers from a disability. It is not at all that difficult to make websites accessible and it is made possible by having special tags placed within the HTML code, enabling alternative access to information that would otherwise be purely visual or auditory ( So although Diigo itself does not have its own tools to facilitate usage for disabled students, the website could easily be made accessible by following the instructions that the U of A explicitly lists on the webpage mentioned above. According to Diigo s privacy policy, they do not collect any personal data and users own their own notes and workpad ( Even though creating an account may sometimes require inputting information such as name and address when the user desires access to Diigo s more advanced tools, it is possible to visit the site anonymously. Diigo does not have permission to collect information regarding the web pages a student uses or disclose any information to a third party although the bookmarked and annotated pages are saved on to their servers. 11

16 Next Steps and Future Work Based on our team s interview with the faculty member that we have selected as the primary audience for the presentation of our app, we have determined that the next steps towards the successful implementation of Diigo, our convenient bookmarking app, are quite simple. The main focus centers around making sure that people informed. Diigo is not a widely-known app, yet it's features bring numerous benefits to its users that are not found anywhere else. We can employ the use of various marketing tactics to spread the word about Diigo and capture people s attention. Once we make more people aware of the app that can truly change and improve their study and research habits, the next step would be to hold formal information meetings for those that have been made aware of the wonders of Diigo and are interested in beginning to use them in their classes. These meetings should involve all the cost and implementation details as well as an information regarding the app s structure and basic introduction on how one can use it. We would need to inform prospective users about the numerous devices that an app as wonderful as Diigo has to offer, devices such as bookmarking, highlighting, sticky notes, outline maker, annotation tools, and tags. We also need to make sure that in our quest to spread the word about Diigo, we do not only aim at capturing the attention of professors and teachers, but students looking to facilitate their studying and writing habits as well. Our next steps should and will include information meetings designed to capture students attention alongside the teachers too. Conclusion 12

17 Diigo represents a contemporary perspective on a classic research and compiling practice used by students and professionals alike in the quest to gain wisdom. It s web tools of collecting links, annotating web pages, and sharing resources with other Diigo users makes it the perfect tool for taking information exploration to the next level. By eliminating the unsustainable amounts of paper and plastic supplies necessary for traditional schoolwork and transitioning to a more wired classroom setting, students and faculty will be inspired to adopt a more collaborative form of communication and resource-sharing. The academic world will benefit from this interactive and inventive novelty paving the way for a unique social and learning experience. Bibliography 13

18 "12 Reasons Teachers Should Use Diigo." ResourceLink. 19 July Web. 5 Dec < "About Diigo." Diigo. Web. 5 Dec < "Diigo Help." Diigo Help. Web. 5 Dec < "Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA)." Office of the Registrar. University of Arizona, n.d. Web. 05 Dec < "Social Bookmarking and Annotating." Digitally Speaking. Web. 5 Dec < Bookmarking and Annotating> "Why Accessible? UA Web Developers Group." Why Accessible? UA Web Developers Group. University of Arizona, n.d. Web. 05 Dec < Appendix 14

19 Appendix A: Summary of Faculty Interview/Feedback Our team interviewed faculty member Daisy Pitkin, who teaches an assortment of creative writing classes at the University of Arizona including the HNRS 222 course Explorations of Creative Writing. When she was approached about an opportunity to integrate technology into her writing course, she was eager to offer some of her time. Pitkin explained that she has been looking for ways to make her class more tech-savvy because she is aware of the changing and progressive state of technology-dependent learning society is going through today. Our team explained how each function of Diigo could benefit her overall instruction efficiency, such as: the annotating features could allow her students more freedom in their readings, the bookmarking capabilities could facilitate the research process of writing nonfiction, and the sharing potential could inspire a more collaborative environment (something incredibly important in a creativestyle course). After hearing about all of the possibilities Diigo offers, Professor Pitkin acknowledged that the technology our team was proposing seemed completely compatible with where she would like to take her class and believed it would enhance the writing-learning experience rather than deface it. Appendix B: Social Bookmarking Phenomenon Bookmarking has been an internet-browser provided feature for many years. In the past, when there was a specific webpage that someone wanted to save for future reference, they could navigate a somewhat confusing toolbar located somewhere within their internet browser of choice, save the website, and most likely not refer back to the saved website until days or weeks later. Due to the amount of time between saving the website and referring back to it s contents, users will (as expected) frequently forget 15

20 both what link they saved the website under in their bookmarks section as well as what they saved the link for/where the important information is located on the webpage. It has also usually required many different procedures in order for someone to share a webpage with someone else for a school assignment or various other projects due to the tricky internet browser navigation systems. Because of this need for simplicity and higher technology capabilities, social bookmarking products have become an important and increasingly popular computer tool for many different types of internet browsers. Uncomplicated bookmarking operations coupled with more productive distribution techniques are driving the market of social bookmarking and revolutionizing computerdatabase engines. 16