I have a particular audience for this post and a general one: Kevin Hodgson and anyone who is interested in one man’s workflow using Diigo’s new outline tool.

Diigo’s new tool has been released in the last quarter of 2014 along with its pdf annotation tool. I have been really jazzed about some newfound capacities within the regular annotation tools–you can annotate with gifs, videos, pix, and anything that can be put into an iframe. In short you can embed almost any media within the annotation text box including text. This really breaks open annotation in unexpected ways. I had never thought of using anything other than text to annotate, but now I can use, for example, a reaction gif to respond to something I am reading. Or a video to enlarge the original context of the post. Or an etherpad like PrimaryPad to expand the conversation. Text ain’t the only game in town now. So you see I am jazzed about the outliner in particular and Diigo in general.

First, it is nothing fancy. What gives this new tool some power is how it is folded into Diigo proper–the social bookmarking and annotation tool. It sort of reminds me of the research function in Google Docs where you can open up Google search and Google Scholar in a panel on the right hand side of the page (Aside: why Google has never bought Diigo is beyond me. Such a perfect fit.)

Here is an example of what I describe earlier from Simon Ensor’s touches of sense blog.

I have an ulterior motive behind this sharing. I want to practice good storytelling. At least I want to practice the story telling that the fine folk at the ds106 ‘fork’ #youshow15 have in mind. According to  Alan Levine and Brian Lamb  (@cogdog and @brlamb) a good showing of your work includes: the work itself, the back story, and some of the process that went into the making of the work. I am hoping to practice that here. Perfection later.  It’s overrated anyway.

I created this post you are reading using Diigo Outliner. Here is the first post I wrote in Outliner. Below is a very rough outline of the process I went through in getting both of these outlined posts to completion.

1. Open up a new blog post text box.

2. Open up the outliner filled with bookmarks you have gathered

3. Start anywhere within the outline and make notes from your links. If you use the description box in Diigo when you are initially gathering the links, you will already have some notes.

4. I began simply by writing the short note “I created this post using Diigo Outliner” above. All you do to create a note is to mouse over the solid bullet point.

5.This is where it gets idiosyncratic. I wrote the introduction of the post on my blog Impedagogy.com I wrote the intro to the post on Diigo Outliner here.

6. I copied what I wrote there back to this outliner. Now I am beginning to get the feel for how I can use the outliner–anyway that suits me.

7. So…I have gotten the post in the outliner to the point where its shape is clear enough to finish it in my blog text box. I copy and move to there.

 

None of this will make much sense unless you actually give Diigo a spin.  I am here to help if you need it.

Now I return to my focus: how well have I treated my audiences and how well have I pursued my purpose.

First, I have tried to keep Kevin in the loop by sending him a shareable link as I have been writing this. The shareable link is a way to allow others to collaborate or ask questions as you go. It is rather unprotected so you want to be careful about who gets it. I sent mine to Kevin via direct tweet. I can send it to you if you are interested, just send me your twitter handle in the comments and I will direct message you so that you can play around in this sandbox. Don’t worry about breaking anything. I will make a copy.

Second, I have tried to show you the work itself, some back story, and a bit of the process. How well I did that is up for grabs, but I did want to work quickly because I promised some folks I would do this.

Here is the link to the original post I wrote in Outliner:  I have not really showed you how I created that post because it is basically as described above, but with a few more embedded trinkets. Suffice to say that for me the outliner process only goes so far. I have an original impetus to write. Maybe I just freewrite a bit, likely an introduciton or just an explanation as to why I was originally interesting. I seek out stuff in my browser using Diigo some of which I put into the outliner and some of which I just tag and annotate as I go, putting it in Diigo’s main library without categorizing at all. I begin to fill in the blanks in the outline.

Please don’t think traditional outline with this. You have the bulleted points and the tabbing. You can move stuff around. That’s about it, but I really like this ultra simplicity even though it has taken me a bit of muddling about to learn to navigate. Counterintuitive, so easy it’s hard.

Time to move the outliner over to WordPress et voila we are here.