The power of the web (Twine & Diigo)

I am a fairly new member of Twine.com and am fascinated by the power of collaborative working. It was only yesterday when reading one of the posts in Educational Technology I came across a very interesting post on using technology to improve literacy and critical thinking.  

And I was immediately 'hooked' on Diigo. I love the simplicity of the interface and the power of its functionality. It does for me what EndNote or any other referencing tool provides - an opportunity to sort out your favourite web pages, annotate them with notes, highlight important parts of the text and even share with colleagues and friends. 

• I am thinking of how this could be used for sharing references, thoughts and developing critical thinking. 
  
• My biggest challenge is to work out how to integrate Twine, Diigo, this blog and myBU. I love the OpenID concept and wish @BU there was some more flexibility and/or guidance on achieving this. 
  
• I will probably use the Facebook account mostly for friends and family, and former students (but I will be looking at making this blog accessible to both Facebook and myBU).

I am keen on exploring options for using Twitter @work. I am not entirely sure how it differs from the Facebook feature 'What are you doing now?' . I just found out that one of the focii of the JISC project on academic social networking that David alerted us to is on how to use Twitter with colleagues. Whilst the last two ideas will present a great opportunity for knowing the latest, how many people are going to adopt it? And how many people will be alienated, purely because the e-fatigue is taking over (or they just don't want their life to be dominated by 'the power of the Net'). Anyway 

• this will be another short-term project to explore and (may be) pilot. 
  
• I need to enrol as a follower to Stephen Fry's twitter - his sense of humour is amazing. We need a doze of this medicine - even if (even more because) it comes in an e-form. I was so glad to find that he is a twitter. 

Talking about Stephen Fry, he mentioned that rather than listening to music whilst walking, he listens to audio books. I have to check whether this works for me. Here are a couple of experiments in the pipeline:

• upload a few audio books on the MP4 player to take with me to the gym (you never know a  Stephen Fry's book might be better than Brian Tracy's work, or may be I will get something totally different - The Twelve Chairs in original will be funny :-) )
• try the same with lessons in French - recent research proved that people can learn the language even if they don't focus on building the vocabulary first). May be Michel Thomas or LiveMocha will have something I can try. 
  

Well, all this is exciting, but should not take priority to:

• revising the paper on e-research supervision
• researching the latest tools for business performance evaluation 
• and competing the detailed feedback for I2M with Waypoint (that's should be the topic for one of the next posts). 

The content matters more than the presentation/communication channels (yet, it is the presentation and the novelty of the task that feeds our motivation).   :-)