Social Tagging: How does it work?

Midterm
Social Tagging: How does it work?

Social bookmarking is a technique that uses a web-based service instead of your browser to save and organize bookmarks. Instead of individually saving the site in a variety of folders, you just type a few keywords called tags and your sites are organized automatically with sites saved by other users, using those same keywords. You even can see a list of your saved bookmarks, not just by alphabetical order, but also by how often you use a given tag. Thus you benefit from the research of others, while having a far more dynamic and helpful system of organization (Jackson, 2006).
What these services do that’s social is take all of the entries that are tagged the same way and connect them, and then connect all of the people who posted those links in the first place. When you bookmark a site, you’ll immediately be linked to everyone else who has also bookmarked the site.
There are many social bookmarking sites that have been on the market for the past few years, but del.icio.us has come to the forefront. From the official website:

“Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet (Connelly, 2009).”

Del.icio.us is all about the tag; finding relevant information is not done through search, but through the tag (Richardson, 2009). Once you tag your newly bookmarked site, del.icio.us gives you the ability to click on any of those tags to be connected to other resources that might be similar to that site.
Flickr is an online site that offers to host images while boding social interaction via sharing and discussing. Upon uploading photos to Flickr, one has the option to restrict access to what he or she publishes by allowing the user to choose between three sharing options (Richardson, 2006). As with most current social software, Flickr will ask the user to tag his or her photos with keywords so that, much like del.icio.us, you can begin to connect your photos with other people’s photos. You can then build an organizational foundation for your uploaded work. The more tags you assign a photo, the better the chance that your photos will find others of the same subject.
Another great facet of Flickr is the ability to start online discussions about the images the users post by adding comments under any individual photo. Users can track their discussions via the RSS feed that Flicker creates for one’s “Recent Comments.” Users can also “subscribe” to a particular tag so that they can receive any new photos that people post with that keyword (Richardson, 2006).
Organizing photos on Flicker is simple; it allows you to create separate albums for different sets of pictures. It even has a slideshow function that creates a series of moving images with just a few clicks via the “organize” link (Richardson, 2006). Not only is it easy to send images to Flickr, but it is also easy to send images from Flickr to blogs and webpages; Flickr is a great tool for being able to create and connect content through publishing .


Works Cited

Connolly, Alan. About. Retrieved March 20, 2009, from Delicious Web site: http://delicious.com/about
Jackson, Lorrie (2006, April 18). Education world. Retrieved March 20, 2009, from Education world Web site: http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/sites/sites080.shtml
Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.


Also check out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x66lV7GOcNU

Mid Term

Of course for the mid term I was assigned to the social tagging group. While I find nothing wrong with the concept of social tagging, I'm confused to how I'd use it in my own classroom. Can anyone explain to me in basic language how sites like Delicious and Flickr work in regards to social tagging? Maybe I'd see the sites as more practical if I could understand how they worked.


I'm a member of this mid term group:

Group 1. Social Tagging e.g.,Delicious, Flickr, etc.
Melissa - What is it?
Beth - How Does it work?
Laura - Examples?
Christopher - How Can it be used in the Art Classroom?

Wordle

Before last week, I had never heard of Wordle before. I've been brainstorming for the past few days on how I could successfully use it as a classroom aid.

How can Wordle be used as a successful critique aid in promoting discussion between students? If a Wordle is passed out to each student containing valuable critique words, is it possible that students will be able to use the Wordle to help them communicate their ideas? Is trying to get students to use Wordle in the classroom pushing the technology on the students or would it be merely beneficial?

Bellow is a sample Wordle I created that I think could be an aid in a class-wide critique.

http://www.wordle.net