Tagging As a Community Building Tool I'm just finished an awesome book called Tagging: People-Powered MetaData for the Social Web by Gene Smith. It sounds like a dry subject, but tagging is really super cool and ha massive implications for the design, building and nurturing of online communities and I thought I'd jot down some notes I took straight out of the book so you can see why. ************************************* How tagging works: 1) Tags are multiple ways of finding something 2) Tags are a way to browse 3) Tags are part of a community pool - act as a bridge between personal and community knowledge 4) Tags connect objects to other objects 5) Tags are hooks used to pull information together from other website that use tags, like Technorait, Flickr, Delicious. Tags by themselves are like a filing system without files - needs USERS and RESOURCES to be useful. Tags can be created from three perspectives: - Information Architecture (organizational content) - Social Software - to facilitate group interaction - Personal Information Management (PIM) - organizing stuff for an individual's use. There can be friction between these. Tagging is related to the re-emergence of oral culture online. (Alex Wright) Tagging is NOT like folders, where you move something from one place (inbox) to another (folder) - tags allow things to live is several places at once. Tagging is SOCIAL = personal + collaborative at the same time. Tags show minority viewpoints as well as consensus. (Tag Clouds are a visualization of this). Value Centered Design = value comes from balancing the goals of the people who create the system (RETURN ON INVESTMENT) with those of the people who use the system (RETURN ON EXPERIENCE). Motivations for users to tag (ROE): - ease of use - to manage personal info - sharing and collaborating (---> communities of interest) - fun - self-expression Business benefits (ROI): - to facilitate collaboration - to obtain descriptive metadata - to enhance fin

See the chart constructed from a lecture by Terry Winograd LIBRARY CULTURE vs. INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL CULTURE

Dr. Miksa's vision for a cataloging future.

Learning theory as it developed from behavioralism (Pavlov) and importance in psychotherapy

Learning theories along 3 dimensions

A good rundown of Learning Theory and contributions to the classroom

A teacher of instructional design and adult learning sums up some of the ideas very well.

Bloom's Taxonomy

Good wrap up of learning style preferences

Democracy as a "learning theory" - interesting

Teaching and instruction tips

We do not expect our learner to travel down our same path as librarian or researcher but to become independent knowledge seekers. There is no right or wrong process of research, although there are many heuristics we can pass on. Applicable use of information requires that we see knowledge acquisition as amorphous and changing. As librarians, so we are too. Let us teach those who come to us our strengths, not our past.

Tools for teaching info literacy skills

Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments. These theories, however, were developed in a time when learning was not impacted through technology. Over the last twenty years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn. Learning needs and theories that describe learning principles and processes, should be reflective of underlying social environments.

A 1983 compendium of teaching suggestions

Pioneered by Knowles.

online journal

"crash course in learning theory"