Tagging and Tag Clouds for assessment

On browsing the NLab conference mentioned below, I came across Jess Laccetti’s blog (one of many), which (sorry Jess) I haven’t kept up with in ages – more shame on me really, because it’s a great blog focused on a lot of stuff we’re interested in here.

Anyway, in her post on the subject of tagging, Jess discusses some ways that tag clouds can be used to attract readers to your blog, - but also something of particular interest to me, which has surfaced on a pretty regular basis, both in the day-to-day and more generally on this pathfinder: How can we use Web 2.0 for innovative activities and possibly assessment with students? And this is often for courses that aren’t focused on new media issues or learning how the technology works. What Jess suggests is using tag clouds for two-way interaction between teachers and students and also for enabling students to analyse and compare the use of specific topics within texts…

Jess writes
We could generate tag clouds (of work that is handed in electronically) of the student's most-used words. Wouldn't that be a good way of showing students why it's necessary to avoid repetition if they can actually *see* the repetition? We could also use tag clouds for our lecture notes or powerpoint presentations etc...to help students get an overview of the key points we're trying to share with them. What about generating tag clouds of 18th C. lit. and current lit. to see how vocabulary changes?

This would definitely be worth investigating…and could easily create a basis for discussion in seminars. It could potentially be used in any subject area.. in Humanities for instance the idea could be adapted for almost any subject we teach. Interestingly, Jess also predicts that we’ll start seeing visual tags and maybe sonic tags. I can only imagine!

Folksonomy II: the wisdom of crowds

I love social bookmarking and tagging. It's a wonderful way to refind old stuff, share new stuff and discover things or people that you would never have found any other way. Yesterday's folksonomy sessions hosted by the IOCT nailed these issues for me. The key outcomes from the sessions focus upon:

1. new tools that may build the social networking experience by enhancing recommendations to users, connecting users to each other, to websites and to web objects, including: StumbleUpon; FURL; del.icio.us; and Magnolia;
2. the impact upon a user's identity, through participation with others in various groups, and the meaning that those users generate from participating;
3. the user's perceptions of the value of specific interactions (with web sites, individual taggers, tags and groups);
4. the politics of Web 2.0, the control of vocabularies and the means of production;
5. the impact on the user of the context of specific tags, based upon taxonomies, individual need and another individual's identity, in order to create personal meaning;
6. Rashmi Sinha's view that "the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding much cognitive cost";
7. the relationship between objects to be tagged, individuals who are tagging, the tags or metadata assigned and the communities that are created;
8. the differences between folksonomy and taxonomy, around the limits on or lack of: structure; control; resources; participation; democratic processes; and the nature of emergent and validated behaviour;
9. analysis of tags through a clean-up process that merges some (e.g. e-learning and elearning) or controls stems (are tags, tagging and tagger the same for analysis?) or evaluates synonyms;
10. the value for refindability; team-work; understanding context; storing resources; working across silos; and networking - I'm really interested in these as possible areas for development for support staff, as well as academic teams and student groups, and maybe in combination with other applications like Facebook for wider networking;
11. the user's ability to use tools for saving, refinding, exploring, searching and interacting, and the belief that granularity has value and that algorithms for searching can make life more efficient;
12. selective sharing, and building or evaluating trust in individual taggers, tags or web objects; and
13. the portability of tags, descriptions, identities and communities across applications over time.

In simple terms tagging and group folksonomies can impact upon work processes, and that will be a fruitful avenue for WP1 and WP2, as well as WP7. We need to focus upon the power for refindability of information, team-work, understanding context, storing resources, working across silos and networking.

However, the sessions got me thinking about control and power and politics, and the work of Ivan Illich. De-schooling and the impact on the role of the professional, in order to broaden a social democratic agenda, is definitely an area for more exploration. As is the merging of work and non-work identities where tools are used in both arenas (if such a dichotemy actually exists).

Folksonomy

"Folksonomy" was recently voted one of the new terms most likely to make you "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard." Our Institute for Creative Technologies is hosting a talk by the inventor of the term – Thomas Vander Wal - tomorrow from 2 -3.30pm in Clephan 0.01. The talk is open to all and will not require any specialist knowledge on behalf of the audience.

A Folksonomy can be created when users of "web2.0" sites such as YouTube, Flickr, LastFM and Del.icio.us add keywords ("tags") to the items they view in order to add information about these items. As more and more users tags such items more information is created about the items. Unlike library catalogues which are created by experts, folksonomies are like catalogues created by everyday people. For some, this heralds a brave new era of democratic information management, for others it heralds the death of expertise.

Thomas Vander Wal lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and this is a rare opportunity to hear him in the UK. He coined the term "folksonomy" in 2004 and is a popular speaker on tagging and folksonomy, social web, and web applications around well-structured information. He is principal, and senior consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, a social web consulting firm. Thomas has been working professionally on the web since 1995 (with a professional IT background beginning in 1988) and has breadth and depth across many roles and disciplines around web design, social web development & research and general web development. He is a member of the Web Standards Project Steering Committee and helped found the Information Architecture Institute and Boxes & Arrows web magazine. See his web site to find out more: http://www.vanderwal.net/

The lecture is presented as part of the AHRC-funded research project Tags Networks Narratives, examining the interdisciplinary application of experimental social software to the study of narrative in digital contexts. It is a unique speculative project assessing the potential for collaborative social-software techniques such as folksonomy in narrative research.

There will also be a morning seminar. You can find out more at: http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/Seminar07.htm

Tagging stuff

We have created a dmupathfinder del.icio.us account to enable us to bookmark relevant resources. It is viewable at: http://del.icio.us/dmupathfinder. We're tagging away in order to understand what vocabularies and ways of tagging emerge. At the end of the project we'll try to capture the themes, developments, redundancies and affordances of this approach.

We are also trying to capture all of our relevant web material in one place. It isn’t possible to get our blogs/wikis within Blackboard fed into a single external site. However, we have created a site in pageflakes: http://www.pageflakes.com/dmupathfinder, which houses:

• DMU Pathfinder-related blogs
• 5 blogs we think we should all keep in touch with regularly
• DMU Pathfinder del.icio.us bookmarks
• DMU Pathfinder del.icio.us tag cloud, which you can search for relevant/related sites
• Relevant reports
  

We intend to monitor the impact of this approach on our project management.

Tagging stuff

We have created a dmupathfinder del.icio.us account to enable us to bookmark relevant resources. It is viewable at: http://del.icio.us/dmupathfinder. We're tagging away in order to understand what vocabularies and ways of tagging emerge. Attheend of the project we'll try to capture the themes, developments, redundancies and affordances of this approach.

We are also trying to capture all of our relevant web material in one place. It isn’t possible to get our blogs/wikis within Blackboard fed into a single external site. However, we have created a site in pageflakes: http://www.pageflakes.com/dmupathfinder, which houses:

• DMU Pathfinder-related blogs
• 5 blogs we think we should all keep in touch with regularly
• DMU Pathfinder del.icio.us bookmarks
• DMU Pathfinder del.icio.us tag cloud, which you can search for relevant/related sites
• Relevant reports
  

We intend to monitor the impact of this approach on our project management.