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.

Information Literacy 2.0 -- Part 1: Annotation

In Bad Habits of Life Long Learning, I talked about an online course I had started called Learning 2.0 that introduces 23 web-based tools for sharing and collaboration. I’m up to lesson number 11, and look forward to little breaks during the week when I surf over to the course website and try out another one or two “things”. As I’ve worked through them, I’ve been thinking about new skills involved in using some of these new technologies, such as annotation, tagging and story boarding. Annotation skills are increasingly important due to the ease with which one can cut and paste or pop a hyperlink into a paper or webpage, ostensibly addressing the topic but potentially failing to provide information that adequately explains the context. I see this problem in a lot of websites, but also—perhaps increasingly--in student papers. If you look at Gene’s discussion of the Learning 2.0 program in Introducing Life-Long Learners to Web 2.0 and compare it to mine in Bad Habits, you’ll see he is kinder to his readers and explains his context and references more fully. I knew better, but was in a rush and didn’t bother explain that “learning 2.0” is a derivative of “Web 2.0” which refers collectively to emerging social and collaborative technologies. Nor did I bother to look up the acronym PLCM so I could explain that it stood for the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina. Annotation is a skill that seems especially important when a project integrates information, images, or other media from other sources, but it’s also important for successful collaboration, whether on-line or off. A faculty colleague, a graduate assistant and I are using a Google Notebook to collect benchmarking information from other program’s websites. Without effective annotation of the clippings we are gathering from other program’s websites, we are likely to have trouble coordinating our work and making good use of the data. I'll say more about tagging and storyboarding in upcoming posts.

Tools

Instructional technologists like to say "technology is just a tool." With good reason, they don’t want to be perceived as promoting "whistles and bells" with no clear educational purpose, but I think some of them have bought into the line a little too deeply. I gave a talk at a conference once that presented empirical evidence that, in some fields of study, technology has profoundly influenced not only the means of instruction, but also the very purpose of some courses. An instructional technologist came up to me after the talk to tell me I had it wrong because technology is just a tool.

Last week, a friend e-mailed me about a presentation she gave at the ELI session on assessment in Boulder that was based on presentations we had given together at EDUCAUSE and AIR. Ironically, minutes before, I had received an invitation from a graduate student in my Curriculum in Higher Education class to visit a wiki he had created for the class. In a blog-like entry in the wiki, he had asked “Where does the wiki fit in curriculum?” He wrestled with trying to classify my wiki assignment within one of five “perspectives” on the purpose of the college curriculum proposed by Posner, whose work we had read and discussed in class. Good question! Over time, I usually develop some intended outcomes and guidelines for my assignment options, and—when I’m really on top of things--I even use different grading rubrics for each assignment, which I make available to students at the beginning of the term. I’ve also taught classes on assessment to community college faculty, so I don’t think anyone would say I’m an assessment laggard.

And yet, there’s nothing quite as exciting as the first time I offer an assignment option and someone takes me up on it. I don’t really know what they’ll get out of it, but something tells me “this could be really good.” I simply have to trust them to make something worthwhile out of it, and they simply have to trust me to focus on the learning process and not the product if things don’t go well. Bereiter & Scardemalia, in their book Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise, talk about a type of expertise they attribute to artists that they call the expertise of promisingness (or something like that)--that is, the ability to sense the promise of a particular creative pursuit without having planned out the product in advance. I think when we talk about the “art” of teaching, this is largely what we mean: the expertise of promisingness. Assessment is part of the craft of teaching, and as such it can be a great tool, but it’s just that: a tool. In the age of the internet and rapidly multiplying means of social computing, saying that technology is just a tool that I use to accomplish some end without recognizing it also as part of the context that makes up my reality is a little like saying that the dream is just in my head but I am not in the dream. It might sound right, but it’s not how many of us experience it any more.

[Originally posted at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/CBriggs, September 30, 2006]

Food Drop for Avatars

I'm concerned my Yahoo avatar isn't getting enough to eat. I plumped her up a tad using the "plus size" button, but I'm still concerned she's only a size 4 (if that!). If you know of similar cases of avatar malnurishment, please contact Yahoo. If that doesn't work, perhaps Bono, Oprah, or the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation can fund a food drop.

Bad Habits of LifeLong Learning

The other day I stumbled onto the PLCM's Learning 2.0 "23 things" course and clipped it into my Google Notebook. Today I returned to see what I could learn from the 23 online lessons designed to introduce librarians to new web technologies for collaborative learning and work. Creating this blog is "thing" #3 out of 23. Thing #2 was listening to a slideshow about lifelong learning called 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners . The first habit was:

"Begin with the end in mind: GOALS"

Geez, now that's a habit I'm pretty good at when I want to be, at least in my head, but if I followed it all the time I probably would never have found the Learning 2.0 website in the first place. It may be "effective" but I doubt it has much to do with making anyone a *lifelong* learner. Seems like just the opposite might be true. When I think about my own learning habits, I'm reminded of Gene's post How Mack Ended Up in Skinny Jeans (aka Gene's post about Mack's post about Jill's post about Steve's post about Stephanie's post--or something like that!).

The goal oriented stuff sounds like descriptions of "adult learners" that college faculty have been taught to take into account, but not without some concern that it might achieve "effectiveness" at the cost of depth and breadth of exploration, and instrumentality at the cost of genuine love of learning. Lifelong learners obviously keep on learning throughout adulthood, but are adult learners, by definition, lifelong learners? I dunno. I'm thinking of a guy I know who was picking up trash on the UIC campus one day and settling into his own faculty office at Harold Washington College the next--he's my archetype for both the "adult learner" and the "lifelong learner"--and I think I'll ask him what he thinks of "begining with the end in mind."