Social tagging in the K-12 Educational Context

Edward C. Lomax, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Learning Technologies Division

Department of Middle-Secondary Education and Instructional Technology

College of Education

Georgia State University

Atlanta, GA 30302

USA

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Overview

• Introduction• Social tagging and bookmarking tools• Social tagging in K-12 education• Myedna: taxonomy-directed folksonomy• Social tagging and intellectual access in an era of

ubiquitous information retrieval• Library 2.0 and beyond: mashup or remix?

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“This is the user’s web now, which means it’s my web and I can make the rules.”

(Powers, 2005)

What is this phenomenon?

• “A new approach to organizing content in the web environment where users create their own textual descriptors using natural language terms (tags) and share them with a community of users.” (Matusiak, 2006)

• “Tagging is fundamentally about sensemaking.” (Golder and Huberman, 2006)

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Some definitions

• “…the practice of saving bookmarks to public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords…”(Educause, 2005)

• “Marking content with descriptive terms…a common way of organizing content for future navigation” (Golder and Huberman, 2006)

• “…keywords or attributes that describe an object, or certain aspects of that object, from the perspective of the individual.” (Seldow, 2006)

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Bookmarking systems: a (very) brief social history

• Began in the form of link directories in information systems such as Gopher.

• Were refined as Hotlists with the development of the Mosaic web browser (1993)

• Became an integral component of the Internet Explorer (Favorites) and Netscape (Bookmarks) web browsers.

• Through work done by groups such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, the Bookmarks concept has morphed into the idea of shared taxonomies and social tagging.

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Features of Social Bookmarking Services

• Organization and categorization of content • End-user sharing of information sources • Collaboration through folksonomy • Search and browsing by tag, topic, or concept• Retrieval through multiple access points

– http://del.icio.us/tag/

• Ubiquitous access through the Internet and WWW

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Social tagging: synonymity

• Collaborative tagging• User tagging• Social bookmarking• Social classification (Hammond, et al., 2005)• Distributed classification• Folksonomy (Vander Wal, 2005 )• Ethnoclassification (Star, 1998)

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Social tagging: benefits

• Simple and straightforward • “…[R]eaders, not just authors, get to tag objects.”

(Weinberger, 2006)• Reflects the individual’s conception of an object

(Seldow, 2006)• Allows for disparate opinions and the display of

multicultural views (Peterson, 2006)

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Social tagging: disadvantages

• Inconsistent• Idiosyncratic• Biased• Subject to multiple interpretations• Assumes that everything on the Internet needs to be

organized and classified. (Peterson, 2006)

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Social tagging: tools and resources

• Blogs (Technorati: http://technorati.com/)• Bookmarks (Delicious: http://del.icio.us)• Books (Librarything: http://www.librarything.com/)• Photos (Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/)• Videos (YouTube: http://youtube.com/)• News

– Reddit: http://reddit.com– Digg: http://digg.com

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Social tagging: tools and resources

• CiteUlike (http://www.citeulike.org)• Connotea (http://www.connotea.org)• Librarything (http://www.librarything.com)• Bibsonomy (http://www.bibsonomy.org)

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Social tagging in k-12 education

• Appropriate in this context due to the implicit social orientation of tagging, the flexibility inherent in tagging vocabulary, the fluid nature of colloquial language in the school setting, and the increasing diversity of content as well as content delivery systems

• “Affords students the ability to use their words to describe content and their words to search for content.” (Seldow, 2006)

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Social tagging in k-12 education

• Online file sharing with social tagging can serve as an adjunct to current teaching practice and provide instructors (and students) with useful ways to store and retrieve information.

• “With the potential to change ‘the Web’ to ‘my Web,’ social tagging technology will soon find its way into classrooms perhaps not as a stand-alone tool, but as a way to help the multi-tasking Millenial generation get organized.” (Seldow, 2006)

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Myedna:

a proposed model for combining folksonomy approach with a taxonomy for information

management in the education sector

(Hayman, 2007)

Key aims of the Myedna model

• Develop a service based on the notion of sharing learning or “Watch me learn”.

• Develop a personal learning space that will:– Record a learning journey– Accommodate a variety of learning types: (formal, informal,

etc.)– Provide an online learning space organized by a person to

meet his or her needs– Remind users what they have learned – Allow people to share information, resources, stories and

narrative (in many formats) with multiple audiences

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Myedna: taxonomy-directed folksonomy

• Australian-based project using a locally developed Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT) to create a taxonomy-directed folksonomy with the following feature set:– Information about the tags

• Useful thesaurus terms• New terms for existing concepts• New concepts and suggested terms

– Information about the items tagged (resources)• Items considered valuable by the user

– Information about the people doing the tagging• Specific tags and items a person has used

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Myedna: taxonomy-directed folksonomy

• “In this proposed model we have built the opportunity for users to: identify, bookmark and evaluate resources of interest to their community; choose tags from an appropriate existing formal taxonomy; suggest new tags; comment on the tags;comment on the resources; find other users with similar interests; discuss any of the above. (Hayman, 2007)

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Social tagging and intellectual access in an era of ubiquitous IR

• “Controlled vocabularies do not reflect user’s language, and [for the purpose of image indexing,] are too rigid and often outdated. User-generated tags, although unstructured and ‘sloppy,’ are richer, more current, and multilingual.” (Matusiak, 2006)

• The following are options that can be employed to incorporate a user-generated tagging into a (digital) collection of information resources:– User-provided tags attached to the metadata in the record set.

– User-provided feedback on the terms assigned by indexers.

– User-supplied tags as an integral component of “a controlled vocabulary that truly speaks the user’s language” (Merholz, 2004)

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Social tagging and intellectual access in an era of ubiquitous IR

• “Folksonomists are confusing cataloging structure with personal opinions and subsequent social bookmarking. These are not the same thing and they need to be separated.” (Peterson, 2006)

• “…[T]ags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems…Rather, they are a supplemental means to organize information and order search results.” (Hammond, et al., 2005)

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Summary and conclusions

• “Ultimately the dichotomous co-existence of controlled vocabularies and collaborative tagging systems will emerge; with each appropriate for use within distinct information contexts: formal (e.g., academic tasks, industrial research, corporate knowledge management, etc.) and informal (e.g., recreational research, PIM, exploring exhaustive subject areas before formal exploration, etc.)”

(Macgregor and McCulloch, 2006)

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Library 2.0 and beyond:mashup or remix?

Library 2.0

• “…the application of interactive, collaborative, and multi-media web-based technologies to web-based library services and collections”… (Maness, 2006)

• Essential elements– User-centered

• Users participate in the creation of content and services. • The consumption and creation of content is dynamic

– Provides a multi-media experience• Multimedia collections and services (e.g, chat reference)

– Socially-rich• Synchronous (e.g., IM) and asynchronous (e.g., wikis) ways for users to

communicate with one another and with librarians.

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Library 2.0: Back to the Future?

Library 1.0• Email Reference/Q&A pages

• Text-based Tutorials

• Emailing lists, Webmasters

• Controlled classification schemes

• OPAC

• Catalog of largely reliable print and electronic holdings

Library 2.0• Chat reference

• Streaming media tutorials with interactive databases

• Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds

• Tagging coupled with controlled schemes

• Personalized social network interface

• Catalog of reliable and suspect holdings, web pages, blogs, wikis, etc.

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Web 2.0: The meme is the message (O’Reilly, 2005)

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Web 3.0: A visionary’s vision

• I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

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Some Salient Features of Web 3.0

• Transformation: (i.e., the Web as a seamless set of interoperable content repositories)

• Ubiquitous connectivity: (e.g., universal broadband Internet access and mobile devices)

• Network computing: (e.g., distributed computing, cloud computing)• Open technologies: (e.g., Application Programming Interfaces (API), Open

Source (systems and application software platforms)• Distributed databases: the emergence of a "World Wide Database" (enabled

by Semantic Web technologies)– Resource Description Framework (RDF)– Web Ontology Language (OWL)– eXtensible Markup Language (XML)

• Intelligent applications: (i.e., featuring the use of natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents)

– Web 3.0 compliant application software will analyze semantic data and leverage the utility of current Web 2.0 technologies (e.g., weblogs, RSS, wikis, user-based tagging, social networking, mashups)

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A skill set for Library 3.0 and beyond

• Transformation of the “library*” will be the operating verb (Saw and Todd, 2007)

– Institutionalization• creating the right culture

– Innovation• Expanded Web 2.0/3.0 oriented service models

– Imagination• (e.g.,the OPAC as a mashup (a web-based service-oriented

architecture)– Ideation

• Supporting and encouraging new ideas– Inspiration

• Ongoing professional development will be the norm

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Discussion Questions

• How do we integrate effective library service delivery with an increasingly networked and multimodal resource base?

• How might professional associations keep us current with timely and appropriate professional training and development programs?

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Thank you for your attention

Edward C. Lomax, PhD

elomax@gsu.edu

(404) 413-8397