Social Tagging for Learning

Overview

Summary

Social tagging is of interest to knowledge communities as it promotes individual learning while engaging in collaborative knowledge building on a larger scale. As participants add "tags" or keywords to artefacts, the resulting folksonomies form classification system based on the participant generated metadata. These folksonomies emerge as "...a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories" (Wikipedia, 2007). Tagging contributes to a non-hierarchical description and evolves into a series of lateral hyperlinks as new tags are added to different but related artefacts.

Knowledge Medium

Social tagging as a knowledge medium is evident in many Web 2.0 products like Flickr, Digg, Delicious and Technorati. It has been thought of as a flat, or one-dimensional experience, but it is becoming evident everywhere we go: in performance art--having people interact with an installation like Nuit Blanche, or in oral history examples, such as Murmur (www.murmurtoronto.ca), where the experience is very much immersive and three dimensional.

Pedagogical Goals and Approaches

• promote individuals to use tagging to describe artefacts in meaningful ways
• explore and analyse social tagging technologies and practices for learning
• look for increased opportunities for social tagging as a knowledge medium

Reflections, Evaluations and Ideas for the Future

This really worked well in Fall 2007 as a way of engaging the class and communicating the ideas. See the implementations section for a detailed evaluation.

Resources

Readings

Feinberg, Melanie (2006). An Examination of Authority in Social Classification Systems. Advances in classification
research, Vol. 17: Proceedings of the 17th ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, ed. Jonathan Furner and Joseph T. Tennis. READ ALL.
http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1783/01/feinberg.pdf Feinberg

Grosz, D. (n.d.). nesstags: A tagging proposition. Retrieved from http://www.nesstags.com

Hammond, T. et al. (2005, April). Social bookmarking tools: a general review. D-Lib Magazine, 11(4). Retrieved from http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.htm

Hayman, Sarah (2007, June 27-29). Folksonomies and Tagging: New developments in social bookmarking. Ark Group Conference: Developing and Improving Classification Schemes. READ PAGES 1-11.
http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/papers/arkhayman.pdf Hayman

Mathes, A. (2004, Dec.). Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata. Retrieved from http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html

Merholtz, P. (2004, Oct. 19). Metadata for the masses. Retrieved from http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000361.php

Nazarea, V. et al. (1998). Defining indicators which make sense to local people: Intra-cultural variation in perceptions of natural resources. Human Organization, 57 (2), 159-170.

Seldow, A.,(2006) Social tagging in K-12 education: folkonomies for student folks
http://pdfdl.oceighty.net/pdf2html.php?url=http://mrseldow.gradeweb.com/custom/Social_tagging_in_K12_Education_Seldow_4_3_06.pdf

Sterling, B. (2005, April). Order out of chaos. Wired News. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/view.html?pg=4

steve.museum. http://steve.museum/index.php?option=com_content&task;=category&sectionid;=20&id;=38&Itemid;=66 and read each paragraph associated with the linked subheadings for About Steve. Read from "What is Steve?" down through "How is the work
Folksonomy. Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy

Terdiman, D. (2005, Feb. 1). Folksonomies tap people power. Wired News. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66456,00.html

Udell, J. (2004, Aug.). Collaborative knowledge gardening. InfoWorld. Retrieved from http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/20/34OPstrategic_1.html

Vander Wal, T. (2005, April 1). Folksonomy Sold. Retrieved June 4, 2005 from http://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1651

Vuorikari, R. (2005). Can personal digital knowledge artefacts' management and social networks enhance learning? European SchoolNet, EUN Consortium, Brussels. http://pdfdl.oceighty.net/pdf2html.php?url=http://www.eun.org/insight-pdf/special_reports/social_networks_learning_vuorikari_9_2005_insight.pdf

Tagging Tools
*FaceTag This is another research project, similar to Steve, but experimenting with the merging of folksonomies with taxonomies. From the website: "It aims to show how the flat keywords space of user-generated tags can be effectively mixed with a richer faceted classification scheme to improve the system information architecture." This webpage only talks about the research project. It does not allow you to work with a prototype of the tool like Steve.
*Google Image Labeler a fun way to collaboratively tag images while playing a game. Its
mechanism also addresses some problems raised in the readings such as poor or repetitive tags.
*Tagalag
*Odeo-a place for tagging podcasts and other media
*Librarything-tag your own collection, meet others with similar readings taste, and more
*Amazon
*TagTagger: tagging of tags
*Surf the News.com-an example of tagging done by "experts", in this case journalists
*NewsCloud-takes all the RSS feeds from the WashingtonPost.com and creates tag clouds
*ZoomClouds-an application designed for people to put on their own websties to create tag clouds

Implementations

Social Tagging Fall, 2007