Posts made by Derek Chirnside

This is from the Moodle forums: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Tags
We will be able to tag ourselves in the future.

1. Tagging people

Moodle1.9: From Moodle 1.9 onwards, users are able to tag themselves and create interest pages around those tags.

Enabling tag functionality

To enable site-wide tag functionality, check the "Enable tags functionality" box in Administration > Security > Site policies.

Describing your interests

Tags allows you to describe your interests in a way that is easy for people with similar interests to find you. To tell everyone what your interests are, go to your profile editing page and enter your interests/tags separated by commas. If a tag you entered already exists, you get associated to that tag. If it does not, a new tag will be created (if you have the capability to create new tags).

Tag pages

Each tag in moodle has a page associated with it. The tag page brings together users, information and resources related to that tag. A tag has a description, links to related tags, a list of users associated with that tag and moodle blocks with resources related to it.

2. Tagging pages

This is not tagging pages however. Tagging is quite a complex issue. Do you allow users to define their own tags?
This person says NO: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=51416

I hope not, as there is nothing I hate more than allowing users to come up with new tags haphazardly. Once, I needed a photo of a hippopotamus. So I go to Flickr-what do I search by-hippopotamus, hippo, hippos, some other term I am not aware of, or even a misspelling? Metadata ceases to be useful when you allow it to grow like a weed. It needs to be centrally managed and defined, and standards need to be applied to what each metatag applies to.

I speak from experience converting a 15 year archive of paper records into a database where each person had been using a different term to refer to exactly the same thing in the paper records. It would have been absolutely useless if I hadn't applied some standardization to it. Before that I had a job doing the same thing with an already existing database.

This doesn't mean users can't submit suggestions for new metadata or that new tags couldn't be created, but it really needs to have some sort of oversight to keep it useful.

Oversighting 1127 users and their tags is NOT a job I'd want. :-) Another questions: How do you manage scalability?

3. Will Moodle get page tags?

I cannot find anything definitive on the official Moodle site about tagging in general. It does not appear on the roadmap.
See: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Roadmap

But the founder of moodle said this:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=51416&parent=235549
Friday, 11 August 2006, 02:32 PM

Yes, the tagging functionality is meant to be extended to all other modules as you surmised.
And the reason there are "official" tags and "personal" tags is precisely to allow more (or less!) flexibility.

4. Marginalia

Why do we not use marginalia more? This enables us to annotate posts . .

So we will be able to tag ourselves, but not our pages and resources. Why not just use delicious?
-Derek

See this post in context

This is a little after thought.

This new people tagging in Moodle could be quite cool for the community side of things.
I have seen a system (I don't know where) which had a section on the profile "Invite me to talk about" followed by interest tags.

Or it could be a monster. :-)

-Derek

See this post in context

This is from the Moodle forums: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Tags
We will be able to tag ourselves in the future.

1. Tagging people

Moodle1.9: From Moodle 1.9 onwards, users are able to tag themselves and create interest pages around those tags.

Enabling tag functionality

To enable site-wide tag functionality, check the "Enable tags functionality" box in Administration > Security > Site policies.

Describing your interests

Tag pages

2. Tagging pages

This is not tagging pages however. Tagging is quite a complex issue. Do you allow users to define their own tags?
This person says NO: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=51416

Oversighting 1127 users and their tags is NOT a job I'd want. :-) Another questions: How do you manage scalability?

3. Will Moodle get page tags?

4. Marginalia

Why do we not use marginalia more? This enables us to annotate posts . .

So we will be able to tag ourselves, but not our pages and resources. Why not just use delicious?
-Derek

See this post in context

I'm not going to be in here again until next week probably - I'm off to a workshop/meeting, one of those with only 20 or so people. Harder to hide, will be fun and busy.

SCOPE:
I think this fills a key place in the portfolio of offerings in this field.

There are several posts around the place in various seminar "Finishing up" threads wondering how to manage afterthoughts. I have thought of the idea of keeping one forum open per seminar - but now this has grown to 20!! or keeping one forum open with one thread per topic: same problem.

I have thought whether we could choose a small number of themes and keep them as ongoing open forums of the Q&A "I have a question" sort. In some respects, Google/Delicious/Technorati helps with this now. BUT there is no substitute for the networking people effect.

This is the problem of scalability.

There are some topics that deserve a re-visit.

Also: social chat and just musing. Where do we do this? One answer is the various blogs that have spawned. But there may be technological gizmos to help with this. We have the problems of scale here . . .

I like being here because I have NO responsibilities. I can just dip in when I want to. I have no responsibility to Make Things Happen, facilitate, etc - just to be a good citizen. There are a lot of lurkers - I know this because I meet them sometimes. This is good. But can we draw them in in some way? Should we try?

We are not quite a 'user community' but Kath Sierra's post has some interesting wisdom

How to Build a User Community, Part 1

Most user communities take a typical path--the newbies ask questions, and a select group of more advanced users answer them. But that's a slow path to building the community, and it leaves a huge gaping hole in the middle where most users drop out. If we want to keep beginning and intermediate users more engaged (and increase the pool of question answerers), we need them to shift from asker to answerer much earlier in their learning curve. But that leaves two big questions... 1) How do we motivate them? 2) How do we keep them from giving lame answers?

Actually, this isn't the biggest problem with most user communities. The real deal-killer is when a new or beginning user asks a "dumb" question. Most supportive, thriving user communities have a culture that encourages users to ask questions, usually through brute-force moderation with a low-to-no-tolerance policy on ridiculing a question. In other words, by forcing participants to "be reasonably nice to newbies", beginners feel safe posing questions without having to start each one with, "I know this is probably a dumb question, but..." <snip>

I think my question for you Sylvia includes this:
What are your goals? (I mean the sponsors etc) - Why did you set this up? Behind the scenes: what oils the wheels?

And my final comment is this: I'm not too worried about anything here!! It's been a great time. We don't need to get too immersed in analysis or postmodern co-construction of ideas about the future. But a little bit of this may help. Charles Handy (The Empty Raincoat) talks about the sigmoid curve, and the inevitable decline, and the benefits of catching this when all indicators are that everything is well.
Here are the other types of questions:

Are we including newcomers as best as we can?
Are we web 2.0 enough?
Are we keeping up with the times?
Who is we?

Sylvia: I hope the canoeing is good at the moment.

-Derek

See this post in context

Derek Chirnside