Great slideshow about what web 2.0 can do for teachers…

[slideshare id=245978&doc=brave-new-www-1201645277347443-4&w=425]

I unfortunately missed the Scope “tagging” webinar, due to “Real life tagging”, but am now busy working my way though the event. Isn’t it great that I can still “participate” even after the fact?!! A recording of the event can be found at: https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?psid=2007-11-22.0937.M.17041726D52CD6EBF6DDE85D1FFEE8.vcr and the supporting wiki can be found at: http://wiki.lidc.sfu.ca/TaG

Jason Toal lead the webinar explaining what tags are and where they come from. Tags essentially are a way to organise information so that you can find it again. The recent trends sees users creating their own tags linked to their own preferences and realities, rather than web designers (or marketers creating keywords for search engines) to lead people to their sites. It comes down to people deciding for themselves how to categorise information so that it makes sense to them. Jason pointed out that tagging’s roots are in the real world, so it is not new:

Another important thing about tags is that it can be shared collaboratively and become a way to interact and communicate. As someone pointed out….”user-organized information is the future…”The issue of privacy was raised again and Jason remarked that we are relinquishing our privacy willingly in social networking and therefore our primary responsibility should be to educate students about the importance of privacy and the issues surrounding it. With geo-tagging and e-mail tagging we can be tagged without our permission.

Tagclouds shows us which tags are used (chosen) more often. I did not know that there are platforms that allows you to create a tagcloud from text. (see http://www.tagcrowd.com/) This could be useful to quickly see what “words” are important in a given piece of material. Tagclouds normally are made up of tags users assign to a resource, presented in a visual way, with the most popular tag “growing” bigger and standing out. Tags can also be more personal like a flickr tagcloud or more academic and technical (see del.icio.us tagcloud) With Zoomclouds, you can create a tagcloud for your website from any RSS feed.

You can learn a lot about people by the things they tag and how they tag it. Jason pointed out that there are 2 kinds of people- filers and pilers. Most people in the group seem to be pilers who file when things get unbearable. It was mentioned that the cool thing about tagging is that it is also an individual activity, which means that it meets needs of pilers and filers.

How should people tag? Tags seem to work most effectively if they are spontaneous and immediate. No right or wrong ways. Everybody will develop their own system and the more you tag the more complicated your tagging system becomes. “Peoples’ mental models of the world around them differ, and the names and associations we give to the objects in our world do as well. Language, Slang, and multiple meanings of words can cause tagsets to become ‘messy’. (ie. blog vs blogging) Plural cases are also problematic, (ie. dog, dogs)

Jason showed us some games and activities to get our students into tagging. One of them was mobtagging. This happens when groups of users freely apply and exchange labels (metadata) to online information. It allows web users to specify, index, search and share information on their own terms.  He also showed us the ESP game and Google image labeler where you can tag images in a game kind of an environment.

So to answer the question of to Tag or not to Tag….I think we should all just Tag along…and maybe we should tag our students along as well….