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Mastering competencies for collaboration and aggregation in distributed learning networks

by Vance Stevens
Department of Computing, The Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Tags and Folksonomies

A folksonomy is a system of classification created on the fly by users of that system. A folksonomy is to blogs and wikis and other tagged artifacts created as Web 2.0 learning objects as the Dewey Decimal System is to the Library of Congress. The latter is a hierarchical system ordained top-down in client-server fashion over a structured information dissemination network. Tags on the other hand are created ad hoc by users of information dissemination networks in peer to peer relationship to one another from the bottom up.

There is much written on folksonomies in copious Web 2.0 literatures (and probably not that much yet in traditional print literatures) giving the relative merits of the top-down client-server (precise, predictable, yet inflexible) vs. bottom-up P2P (sloppy, unpredictable, yet creatively comprehensive and adaptable) ways of classification. For our purposes, we can say that tagging is the key to collaboration for many purposes over the Internet as it has evolved to date, including that of bringing students together in writing projects.

There was an excellent presentation that touched on this topic at the Future of Education conference, http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=12 - Knowledge beyond Authority by David Weinberger, whose abstract was "We have long settled protocols for determining who and what to believe, that is, for determining authority. In the age of the Internet, those protocols are being overturned, or at least surrounded by new types and means of authority. Looked at from the traditional perspective, the Internet is a threat to knowledge. Yet it also clearly is knowledge's future. What will knowledge and authority look like in the age of the Net?" The presentation overviewed existing authoritative classifications schemes before showing how 'messiness' could be a 'virtue' when classification systems record metadata and allow searches flexibly on parameters not anticipated by the developers of the scheme (i.e."Owners of information do not own the organization of that information.")

There are two major systems for getting at information distributed over the Internet and classified by means of tags, and these are Technorati http://technorati.com and Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us. Whereas both base their power on tagging, the two operate in distinctly different ways. Technorati scans the blogosphere for tags that appear in blog posting, which were put there by the person who created the post. Del.icio.us on the other hand allows users of blog posts and all other web artifacts assigned their own URL to be classified according to the whims of the users of those artifacts.

Technorati

Let's take these one by one. Technorati is the world's foremost authority on blogs. It constantly trolls the blogosphere and gathers statistics from the blogs it knows about. It knows about blogs that it can ping, or that ping Technorati. Ping means that one server sends a data packet to the other and registers a response, thus verifying the existence of that server. In order for your blog (or your students' blogs) to be found by Technorati, either you have to have your blog ping Technorati manually, or you have to be using a blogging server that Technorati knows about so Technorati will simply go there and check for new blogs. If you use such a system then your blog must be made 'public' on that system in order that it will accept and respond to pings from Technorati.

If all is in order then you should be able to use Technorati to search for and find your students' blogs based either on text strings that appear in the blog postings themselves (Technorati's default search mode) or on the tags your students have used (which is one of the options in Technorati's advanced search mode). If you use the latter mode, the system reports a few of the most recent postings tagged with the term you are searching, and you have to expend an extra click to see ALL of the postings on that term, but it is energy well spent, because at that point you will find a Subscribe button at the top of the full list. This is the RSS feed for the content you have just aggregated and if you copy its link location to your Bloglines or feed aggregator of choice then you will be able to monitor postings with that tag as they are harvested by Technorati.

This is a powerful and productive way of collaborating with students and colleagues from around the world, who don't necessarily know of each other's existence at the time a project or blog posting was conceived. This system has been used to aggregate blog postings at numerous international conferences. Participants in these conferences are asked in advance to tag consistently with one another. For example, participants in the recent Webheads in Action Online Convergence http://wiaoc.org were asked to tag using wiaoc2007, and blog postings with that tag can now be aggregated using all of the techniques mentioned so far (and wiaoc is also a productive tag; try it: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/wiaoc). Accordingly for the recent Future of Education conference, George Siemens requested that participants use a pre-assigned tag FOE2007, and content associated with that tag is being aggregated at: http://www.pageflakes.com/ltc/10987119, and you can subscribe to the Technorati feed on that tag by copying the link shortcut to your Google Reader or Bloglines from the top of this page: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/foe2007. This works for other web artifacts as well as blog posts. Early in September I attended an IUCN conference in Alexandria whose photos are being aggregated at http://www.technorati.com/photos/tag/iucnalex, and for the EuroCALL conference itself, I see that the Virtual Strand blog has been tagged eurocall2007: http://www.technorati.com/blogs/tag/eurocall2007

Pageflakes <http://www.pageflakes.com> is an aggregation service that allows users to create a portal that can be dynamically updated on specified content. It has attracted some interest particularly after its use was illustrated at the Future of Education conference (as noted above). Barry Bakin for example has created an experimental homepage for his class on pageflakes at http://www.pageflakes.com/barry.bakin/12217248 which he expects might some day replace his current homepage (a class blog) and he's written some background on his experiment at http://tech4esl.blogspot.com/.

This summer, I instigated a project where a group of 4 teachers engaged their students in writing using blogs, and all had the students use the tag term writingmatrix (Stevens, Quintana, Zeinstejer, Molero, and Sirk, 2007). We then set about tutoring each other and the students in turn how to use tagging and RSS to aggregate each other's blog posts. At the time the Writingmatrix project was conceived, Barbara Dieu was already applying similar techniques to her http://www.dekita.org project. For example, there is aggregation of content at http://www.dekita.org/orchard using Gregarius, http://gregarius.net/. Barbara and I have gone into more detail on aggregation techniques we use in these projects at Dieu and Stevens (2007).

Del.icio.us

The next step for the Writingmatrix project, and for this paper as well, is to describe how Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) is used to help us organize content on the web according to folksonomies.

Del.icio.us at http://del.icio.us has become a highly popular social bookmarking site. However, some concepts involved in social bookmarking elude immediate understanding and must be explained. First, one must understand the concept of tags, when as we have seen, how these are used is not apparent to the most casual users of the Internet. Secondly, one must understand the concept of social bookmarking as opposed to the kind most of us have used since our first encounter with browsers. Explanations of Del.icio.us are appearing directed at educators; for example, John Pederson's tutorial on Using Del.icio.us in Education http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ad62vwjv8zm_6fh3r2s and Aixa Almonte's Learning 2.0 Tip-of-the-week for 24 May 2006, a 9 min screencast on using del.icio.us to build a 'reading list' and a 'syllabus' - http://learning2.0.ottergroup.com/blog/_archives/2006/5/24/1981354.html

In normal conception, a bookmark is a copy of a URL stored with your personal profile information on the local computer, the one you are using at the moment. Since it's stored only on that computer, it is not available to you if you move to a different computer. One aspect of Del.icio.us is that it stores your bookmarks on the Internet where they are available to you no matter where you are in the world as long as you can access your Del.icio.us account.

The similarity ends there. Del.icio.us also lets you tag your bookmarks. In this way you apply your own folksonomy to the bookmarks. Del.icio.us has a helpful way of recalling tags you have used before. So if I want to tag a site I've just bookmarked CALL, as soon as I type C, all the bookmarks beginning with C present themselves. I don't have to type out these tags each time, I simply select them from my list. If I want to go back later and add or remove tags, I can of course do so.

Not only that, but if I log on to my account at Del.icio.us and see the sites I've tagged recently, I might find a note that this site was tagged by others on the network. I can see their user names, the tag we used for this site in common, and other tags these users have used. By browsing the folksonomies of others I can expand my own conception of the topics I am interested in, I can find others interested in the same topics, and I can see what sites these others are visiting on the Internet.

This becomes interesting to a writer if the site tagged is one's own (one's own blog for example). You can see who who has visited your site and apparently interacted with it with enough interest to have made the effort to tag it.

The tagging and collaboration techniques discussed here also utilize tools which I think educators can use, once they are aware of how they work, in the teaching of languages. We now see how these tools were applied to a project specific to second language learning.

References

Dieu, Barbara, and Vance Stevens. (2007), Pedagogical affordances of syndication, aggregation, and mash-up of content on the Web. TESL-EJ, Volume 11, Number 1: http://tesl-ej.org/ej41/int.html

Stevens, Vance, Nelba Quintana, Rita Zeinstejer, Saša Sirk, and Doris Molero. (2007). Writingmatrix: CONNECTing students with blogs, tags, and social networking. An online presentation given May 18, 2007 at the WiAOC online conference. Links to recording and slides retrieved August 20, 2007 from: http://webheadsinaction.org/node/174

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Last updated: September 3, 2007

Copyright 2007 by Vance Stevens
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