Page History

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

Just as tools like Flickr, Facebook, del.icio.us and others have replaced taxonomies and ontologies in social networking contexts, next generation folksonomic tools will allow researchers to dynamically create coding and classification schema that reflect the collective wisdom of their community. College websites incorporating such tools would use tags created by users to enable sophisticated non-linear browsing, searching, and finding based on user perceptions and needs. Tagging by members of a specific learning community such as students in a particular course could lead to a course-specific language, or a kind of shorthand for complex topics, that would enrich discussion and increase a feeling of community instead of isolated learning.

...

Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression

• makes information more intuitively retrievable
• makes use of community knowledge
• raises questions about classification and identification that encourage both analytical thinking and wider ontological questioning, through the act of tagging a complex subject
• facilitates creation of knowledge webs and sharing of information

Examples

• The Art Museum Community Cataloging Project seeks to resolve the disparity between museum professionals' tagging terms and those of museum visitors—which rarely match—by encouraging public tagging of museum collections, online. http://www.steve.museum/

...

• A teacher's blog suggested that folksonomic tagging would be useful in storing old lesson plans and other classroom " binder" materials that school districts don't have the resources to otherwise archive. http://www.edugadget.com/2005/02/01/the-long-tail-of-education/

...

For Further Reading

Communal Categorization: The Folksonomy
(David Sturtz, December 16, 2004) Provides a general overview of folksonomy. http://www.davidsturtz.com/drexel/622/sturtz-folksonomy.pdf^{Image Removed}

Folksonomies: Power to the People
(Emanuele Quintarelli, June 24, 2005) This paper discusses the history and current manifestations of folksonomies. http://www.iskoi.org/doc/folksonomies.htm^{Image Removed}

Folksonomy for Applied Analysis and Market Action
(The Community Engine Blog, February 23, 2005) Overview of folksonomy, cultural issues regarding tagging, and how tagging can be used to target a specific group. http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/02/folksonomy_for.html^{Image Removed}