Information Literacy 2.0 -- Part 2: Tagging
I’ve been thinking about tagging lately, but I’m not sure I’m getting anywhere in trying to understand it as an information literacy skill. Tagging means assigning key words or search terms to a picture, piece of text or other digital object so the owner or others can find it when they enter the tag into a search engine. By finding it they also find other people who share common interests. I’m wondering if it’s realistic to think of tagging as a skill that can be improved through education, and if so, whether frameworks already exist for teaching it as a skill.
Some of us certainly bring knowledge of existing taxonomies to our filing and searching tasks—we think hierarchically and in Boolean relationships, and we plug in terms we think are more likely to be standard key words within a particular discipline or professional community. Even with many years of library and research experience, however, I find myself using this approach less and less when I search on the Web. In Google, I use messy search strings that remind me less of the Library of Congress and more of charades or some other party game that involves rapidly spewing clues so others can guess a word or phrase. Maybe I’m wrong, but this approach often seems to get the job done better than a taxonomical approach. I don’t have enough experience with tagging yet to be able to comment on my tagging habits, but lately I find myself increasingly impatient for improved ways to link documents in Windows instead of, or at least in addition to, organizing them in folders, and clearly this feeling is related to the whole associational nature of the Web.
At this point I had planned to segue into the topic of folksonomy--the idiosyncratic way individuals tag things for their own future retrieval—but I’ve discovered so much discussion about the definition of the term and the nature of the phenomenon as it relates to and differs from tagging that I’ve decided to leave that alone for now. (If you’re interested, check out Wikipedia’s [November 3, 2006] discussion of "folksonomy" and the “response by Thomas Vanderwal, who is generally credited with having coined the term folksonomy and has a very different take on its meaning.)
So, what do we know about tagging that we could teach to students to make them more effective at tagging and more efficient at searching tagged media? Are there insights that could speed up what they learn from practice, or provide better “technique” than some students might ever develop on their own? Perhaps a starting place is to make students aware of the differences between the structure and growth patterns of social and conceptual networks compared to those of hierarchical sorting and storage systems. Then again, perhaps digital natives don’t need to be taught to appreciate relational networks as something different because they probably already have more experience navigating in associational space than in hierarchical space.
Still, the concepts of communities of practice and discourse seem relevant to one’s ability to effectively code switch when entering a new domain of sharing. Perhaps this is the core “literacy” skill involved in tagging. In other situations requiring code switching, such as shifting from neighborhood use of English to classroom use of English to use of English in formal writing, we don’t necessarily teach people all of the variations in speech, but instead empower them by calling their attention to the differences in expectations in different social environments. Indeed, perhaps this is a particularly good example, because in the past teachers simply tried to replace home and playground language with classroom language, but today more teachers recognize the legitimacy and true social value of preserving such variation, as long as the student develops command over when to use each type. Likewise, in teaching about tagging, we could promote increased standardization that would transcend sharing domains, or we could take a more “multicultural” and “intercultural” approach that promotes more agile movement from one sharing domain to another.
Some of us certainly bring knowledge of existing taxonomies to our filing and searching tasks—we think hierarchically and in Boolean relationships, and we plug in terms we think are more likely to be standard key words within a particular discipline or professional community. Even with many years of library and research experience, however, I find myself using this approach less and less when I search on the Web. In Google, I use messy search strings that remind me less of the Library of Congress and more of charades or some other party game that involves rapidly spewing clues so others can guess a word or phrase. Maybe I’m wrong, but this approach often seems to get the job done better than a taxonomical approach. I don’t have enough experience with tagging yet to be able to comment on my tagging habits, but lately I find myself increasingly impatient for improved ways to link documents in Windows instead of, or at least in addition to, organizing them in folders, and clearly this feeling is related to the whole associational nature of the Web.
At this point I had planned to segue into the topic of folksonomy--the idiosyncratic way individuals tag things for their own future retrieval—but I’ve discovered so much discussion about the definition of the term and the nature of the phenomenon as it relates to and differs from tagging that I’ve decided to leave that alone for now. (If you’re interested, check out Wikipedia’s [November 3, 2006] discussion of "folksonomy" and the “response by Thomas Vanderwal, who is generally credited with having coined the term folksonomy and has a very different take on its meaning.)
So, what do we know about tagging that we could teach to students to make them more effective at tagging and more efficient at searching tagged media? Are there insights that could speed up what they learn from practice, or provide better “technique” than some students might ever develop on their own? Perhaps a starting place is to make students aware of the differences between the structure and growth patterns of social and conceptual networks compared to those of hierarchical sorting and storage systems. Then again, perhaps digital natives don’t need to be taught to appreciate relational networks as something different because they probably already have more experience navigating in associational space than in hierarchical space.
Still, the concepts of communities of practice and discourse seem relevant to one’s ability to effectively code switch when entering a new domain of sharing. Perhaps this is the core “literacy” skill involved in tagging. In other situations requiring code switching, such as shifting from neighborhood use of English to classroom use of English to use of English in formal writing, we don’t necessarily teach people all of the variations in speech, but instead empower them by calling their attention to the differences in expectations in different social environments. Indeed, perhaps this is a particularly good example, because in the past teachers simply tried to replace home and playground language with classroom language, but today more teachers recognize the legitimacy and true social value of preserving such variation, as long as the student develops command over when to use each type. Likewise, in teaching about tagging, we could promote increased standardization that would transcend sharing domains, or we could take a more “multicultural” and “intercultural” approach that promotes more agile movement from one sharing domain to another.
posted by Charlotte at 10:14 PM
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