Posts made by jason toal

Thanks Therese,

and everybody for the interest and participation in yesterdays session. It was a blast! Im looking forward to integrating all the contributions and comments into the wiki page, and following the rest of the seminars in the social media discussions.


Jim,

That youtube video is quickly becoming a classic, thanks for including it here!

Just goes to show how much we are all having to become librarians or 'mini classifiers' of our own information. It highlights (to me) the importance of tagging and for educators to be familiar with techniques and conventions that are emerging on the web.

Thanks to all for the responses!

regards

jason

Hi Carolyn

That is an excellent point. I am fascinated by the terms people choose to tag things, and particularly note the differences that occur depending on the TYPE of resource being tagged. Music for instance, has of course the tendency for genres to be used as tags, (rock, dance etc) but as a means of organizing music listening in sites such as in last.fm, tags can become a playlist title such as "music for a rainy day", where the tag becomes a descriptive phrase rather than a simple keyword.

To me, these resonate much more strongly to the human mind than the machinic nature of tags like "scope668", where the goal is simply to group similar items for later or collective reference. A secondary meaning is implied in the tag above that somehow gives it more depth.

To restate your own question, I wonder if there are any examples of tags emerging from a classroom situation that were unexpected or innovative?
Hi Sylvia

I will (for sure) be tagging the KEY resources for my presentation with scope688, but having collected over 100 of them on the topic of tagging I will have to try and be selective.
http://del.icio.us/draggin/tagging

I am posting an outline of my presentation as well, with a list of links which will also be a good way to get at some of the references and websites I am including.

http://wiki.lidc.sfu.ca/TaG

I suppose when I am done I can copy this into the SCoPE wiki as well. (can there be too many ways to find something?)

I will be digging through my collection to find the most relevant links to educators, particularly if there are examples of courses that use tagging in a very specific way. I wonder if I should start a new thread for others to add their own contributions too? hmmm
Hi Cynthia,

Admittedly, I loaded the title of this talk to draw some attention and raise a few eyebrows, but believe me it was with tongue planted firmly in cheek. In the case of librarians, it is all too easy to go after the controlled vocabulary vs. folksonomy discussion, as has already been done by many before me, namely the ongoing Shirky and Weiberger work that Jim references below. Personally I dont feel it is as simple as that anymore.

In my experience (and some of my closest friends are librarians! ;) ) most "architects of information" DO see the benefits to tagging, particularly when the needs of the user are considered. I mean, librarians cant organize everything for everybody these days based purely on the amount of information that is out there. Our own library at SFU has recently launched a searchable database of its e-journal collection, and has built in a tagging interface to allow users to associate a personal set of keywords with the journals they are interested in.
E-journals at SFU - (sorry, you need an SFU ID to take that for a test run)
This addresses one of the fundamental principles of tagging, that of organizing information and will be a key aspect in my presentation.

For educators however, I will suggest another angle, that tagging offers a means for your students to take part in the classification process themselves, and that through the tagging of online resources, they can begin to create their own mental model around a particular domain or topic.

Not actually being an academic educator (or instructor of any kind at the moment) I better stop there, but am curious if you or others think that the simple act of labeling/categorizing/tagging contributes to the learning process in this or anyway? Or if that is even a relevant question.