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Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Social Media in Genealogy and Family History: Tech Tuesday Tip

My employer, Tarleton State University, recently formed the Texas Social Media Research Institute.  They held their first Social Media Conference on December 2.  Most of the presentations were by communications students of their research, but outside presentations were also solicited.  Being that three of the institute's directors are friends of mine, I volunteered to do two.

I don't claim to be an expert on the use of social media in genealogy, but we couldn't afford to bring in Thomas MacEntee or Amy Coffin or any of the fabulous geneabloggers that I follow.  So, my presentation was pretty personal, with examples of how blogging, photo sharing sites, and Google Maps have helped me in my family history research.

In my work as a librarian, I do a lot of instructional sessions, and I generally do them live.  I wanted to do the presentation the same way, rather than as a PowerPoint or even a Prezi.  However, since the conference proceedings were going to be published online, I needed some way to archive my presentation.  I'd bookmarked the blog posts and other web pages I wanted to show in a Delicious stack, but decided at the last minute to give Diigo lists a try, so I could add my comments on each page as a "sticky note" that would be visible to viewers later in Diigo's Webslides format.  Here's the result (also at http://slides.diigo.com/widget/slides?sid=52687):



Diigo is still in beta (the help pages in particular are lacking), so this WebSlides took some time to put together, and doesn't work quite as I'd like it to.  For one thing, WebSlides won't show anything on secure web pages (those whose URLs begin with https), so web pages for the last 12 slides can only be viewed by clicking on the link on the lower left corner of the slide to open the page in a separate window.

Let me know what you think.

UPDATE:  The WebSlides do NOT show my sticky notes unless you are signed into my Diigo account - bummer!   Here is a link to my list of annotated web page links for this presentation:
http://www.diigo.com/list/riofriotex/social-media-in-genealogy-and-family-history

© Amanda Pape - 2011 - click here to e-mail me.

2 comments:

  1. For the record, I am quite affordable...it's just that Texas frowns on me leaving my son home alone with a box of cereal and a remote while I paint the town.

    I got many hits on my blog from your Diigo slides, so it seems pretty well received to me. Great job!

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  2. Thanks Amy! We didn't even have money to pay for your transportation, which I think would have been the least we could do. :)

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