Thing #14: Tagging in General

I actually had an epiphany about tagging when I was updating (yet again) my lecture for ART 100W. One of my standard learning objectives is the attempt to explain the difference between keywords and controlled-vocabulary subject headings. I realized that tags fit right in between, and I've actually incorporated them into my presentation--on the assumption that many of the students are probably more familiar with tags than with subject headings. Here's the continuum:

Keywords
–not consistent, not neccesarily a desciption of what it's about
Tags (Flickr, Del.icio.us)
–not consistent, but does describe what it's about, since creator assigns it
Subject Headings
–consistent & does describe what it's about

It'll be interesting to see if this helps anybody "get it." Another thing that occured to me as I've rooting around all these sites that have to do with tagging--it's a good background for students to have when you try to teach the above. If they've done tagging themselves, or search these kinds of sites, they'll understand the challenge of calling something what it is, and how different people may describe the same thing using very different words. If "learning by doing" is a good technique--and it is--they might understand some elements of information literacy better than anyone who hasn't done this DIY version of classification.

Thing #14: Technorati

Ah, so that's what it is. You know, back in the days of my youth--I'm talking about 40 years ago, here, folks--I would have been crazy about blogging, as would my best friends. Hard as it is for most of the students to whom I attempt to introduce to the joys of information literacy to believe, we used to write for fun. Pages and pages of the stuff--fiction, nonfiction, self-consciously clever letters, plays...we used to challenge each other to diagram long sentences for the hell of it, just to show we could. (I think the record was a 47-word sentence.) Being able to share that writing with the world at large, and have total strangers respond to it, would have been a heady experience.

Curmudgeonly old incident of flatulence that I am now, I care less about what the world at large thinks. I still write for fun but nowhere near as much--just don't have the time. Some of my best creative writing gets done at work...but I digress.

Did I get different results searching "Learning 2.0" in blogs vs, tags vs. directory? Well, duh. Like a lot of these sites that allow only keyword seaching, phrase searching is a problem. I tried using “Learning 2.0” (including the quotes). It took forever and I still got some dubious results. Then I discovered the "Advanced Search" which lets you look for "exact phrase" and specify only "in blogs about" X. I used "libraries" and got much better results. Either way it takes a lot longer than the basic search.

Looking at the "most popular" was depressing--Brack Obama #13 but Paris Hilton #3. Egad.