Koltay—and likely most of you who are reading this column—have observed how Web 2.0 and the use of folksonomies have created conditions that result in information overload. When we provide applications that let users manage information, and those users have limited to no awareness of knowledge organization for the Web, the information architectures that evolve for users and the entire system may be less than optimal.
Since most users are not equipped to produce sound classification schemes or efficient top-down taxonomies on their own, their impact on any system creates what I call a literacy gap, depicted in Figure 6. Depending on the other signatures of information overload that play out in users’ interaction with a system, the consequences of their literacy gap can lead to information overload. Koltay’s article makes this claim, and I agree.
ksvinall on 08 Jul 20This is a podcast produced by Stacey Margarita Johnson that focuses on many different aspects of language teaching. Stacey is the Assistant Director for Educational Technology at the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University and teaches Spanish. Topics of previous We Teach Languages episodes include heritage language maintenance, language legitimacy, linguistic variation, translanguaging, and emotional labor.
