Life is like a quilt

Life is like a quilt
Small pieces combine for a masterpiece

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Tags are great, but does your group have a plan for retrieval of your research?

I can now see what the fuss is about, social bookmarking is great.  I understand how learning a formal system of labeling topics is difficult and not everyone who surfs the web can take the time to learn a formal system.  HOWEVER, someone needs  more formal training if you have a lot of people in your group tagging, and the group wants to retrieve the information from those  valued web sites two months or two years  from now. What tags did you use? It seemed clear at the time but now can you remember after tagging one hundred sites?  I think that tagging is a great way for people working together to narrow down the overwhelming amount of sites to look at on any given subject.  I think that if you need scholarly information, reliable sites and databases, pathways back to the best sites and reasonable, usable organization of the information contained in the sites, some form of subject authority needs to be used.   I am teaching the other teachers  how to use the social bookmarking and they like it very much, but we use the suggested tags .  I think my tags are helpful to my peers as well, but we agree to use the suggested tags for the site  and if we use personal  tags we agree to place them at the end of the list.  I have found that a short list of possible tags for subjects is helpful to students who may not know synonyms and are unclear on how to tag so they can search by tags later.