From [[http://cpsquare.org CPsquare]], the community of practice on communities of practice.
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... part of the technology for communities project,
started off by the authors of [ Digital Habitats], Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, and John D. Smith. |
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Definition
Tagging objects such as URLs with an identifying word or phrase that can be accessed and thus shared with others. Many different systems support tagging, so that tags have different scope (e.g., tagging images vs. tagging any resource at all). See the [Wikipedia] definition or Lee LeFever's introduction [in plain English].
Uses in communities of practice
- Alerts community members of relevant resources identified by others, whether they are "in the community" or not
- Marks items in such a way that others who share like interests or vocabulary can find them more easily
- Comments on tagged items note the value of a resource by a trusted individual
- Tagging is a low-effort way for people to contribute to a community's resource discovery work
- The simplest and lowest-cost way of creating a community library
- Overlapping tags lead to the discovery of a community's key terms
Tool Polarities
- Together/apart: What makes tagging powerful is that we can do it easily, on the fly, separately from others, but the software does the kind of aggregation that provides collective benefits. For example it may allow us to see the tags that others have used on for a specific resource, creating togetherness around that object with people that we don't personally know. Tagging is usually asynchronous in the sense that tags and tagged resources accumulate slowly over time.
- Participation/Reification: Tagging itself is more oriented toward reification in that it forces us to "name" or informally classify resources. But it provokes participation in the sense that we get to see the tags that others have used. But tagging does not in itself create a sense of conversation with other taggers (other tools are needed for that, such as occasional summaries or references).
- Individual/group: The beauty of tagging is that we do it individually, but it has group benefits and that we can easily benefit from the tagging of other people.
Key features
1. Interoperability and openness
- Import / Export bookmarks. Ability to upload bookmark file from a browser or download them for use on another system.
- You can start off by converting existing bookmarks to tagged resources in public. Although it may take extra work for them to be really useful to a community, you can easily begin building on earlier work.
- Tag from anywhere. You don't have to go to a website to tag something.
- Various widgets associated with your browser or on a web page can make it easier for you to tag things.
- Conversely you can put "tag this" buttons on content your community produces.
- Anybody can contribute. Anybody who wants to can use a tag, so it invites contributions from the most peripheral members of a community. Conversely there's no control over who uses a term: there is no ownership.
2. Tagging as a way of making classification activity visible.
- Count the number of uses.
- It can be useful to see how many other people have used the same tag or have tagged the same resource with a tag.
- See who uses a tag (and how, with a pivot feature).
- If a tag is unique, it may be worth connecting with someone who uses the tag, inviting them to participate in your community in other ways.
- Once you see someone else using a tag, consider, "what else do they tag? what other tags do they use?"
- Arbitrary formation of a group. When you find other people using a tag that is meaningful to you, it can be the beginning of a community connection.
3. Tagging tool and platform considerations
- Special-purpose tagging platforms. Access to a tag on a built-for-tagging platform such as http://delicious.com can make tagging more accessible
- the easier it is to tag things, and the more tags are used, the greater the incentive to tag things
- Tagging tools on multi-function platforms are a powerful way of organizing user activity,
- RSS feeds can gather tagging activity from different platforms and multiple tags together for delivery elsewhere.
Examples / uses:
- A community wants to organize a set of web-based resources they discover on a particular topic. They decide to use one tag and write up the results after a given amount of time
- A community decides to participate in a synchronous event like a conference and want to open resource discovery to a larger group. They agree on a tag to connect registration forms, topics for discussion, likely hotels, or other resources all into one "bucket."
- Useful scoping. There are benefits from using easy to remember, obvious tags. On the other hand, more esoteric tags that will only be understood by a small community (so used only as intended) also have their advantages.
- Working out the trade-offs in a community may have value in and of itself
- Deciding on uniqueness or generality is an expression of community attitude toward the world.
- By using tagging platform such as http://delicious.com a community is sharing vocabulary ("name space") with the world.
- Developing community norms and agreements. Any mechanism to make tagging more social and more transparent will help make it more useful. Communities can develop agreements about:
- Appropriate use and misuse
- The meaning of a tag
- Tag once only, do not re-tag
- Tag as recommendation (or warning)
- Summarization or systematic scanning. Given a certain volume of tagging, having a periodic summary of all of the items that have been given a common tag can provide a high-value index that is selective and interpretive. See Beth Kanter's example under "Resources" below.
- Making tagged items visible. Including a tagstream via RSS on a traditional community platform such as a discussion board or wiki.
Related tools
- RSS feeds to make scanning the stream of items that are tagged more convenient and systematic.
- If periodic summaries are produced the summaries should go in Blog posts
See also:
Tool providers or instances
Resources
- Gene Smith, Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web (New York: Macmillan Computer Pub, 2007) http://isbn.nu/0321529170
- A historical perspective in D-Lib Magazine April 2005 Volume 11 Number 4: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html
- Beth Kanter's work on the NPtech tag is a great example of using a tag to bring a community into sharper focus, make its resources more available, etc., etc. When someone begins using the nptech tag, they announce their participation in the community.
- http://wiki.lidc.sfu.ca/TaG has lots of academic resources
- http://dekita.org/articles/delicious-and-p2p-efl-esl-x an explanation and an example in practice + visuals
- http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html Pedagogical affordances of syndication, aggregation, and mash-up of content on the Web (article in the TESL-EJ June 2007, Volume 11, Number 1)
- http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sometaithurts/ (a humorous example)
