http://www.wordle.net/createI guess my attitude about social tagging and metadata dates me in a lot of ways. While I consume digital media of various kinds ravenously I have this mental block that prevents me from treating it differently than I do stacks of real life books and discs. While I am constantly downloading music and movies I can never bring my self to care about metadata because my real life organizational habits more or less carry over to all of my digital libraries. I have a friend that obsessively creates Meta data for everything on his hard drive, but he is also some body who makes little tags for his bookshelves as if it were a bookstore or library. My organizational sense revolves around obscure things that only make sense to me. A pile of books on my shelf may look completely unrelated accept that I put them there because they are all good visual references, so a time life book on wildlife ends up right next to a book full of 19th century photos of Philadelphia. It looks random to an outsider but to me that is organization. Do any of you use social tagging systems in ways that are especially particular to your self? What do you think these little personal systems say about who you are?
I feel the same way you do about social tagging, but the more I read about it, the more I feel as though I'll be able to accept it as part of the modern classroom. Perhaps once you're in a classroom setting, social tagging will become something you can consume.
ReplyDeleteI understand what you are saying about organization being a personal thing.It usual is. The example you gave of stacking the books together by unsual subjects is perfect because it is trues that you chose to combine those subjects together but a different person might not have put those subjects together. Well, would you like to understand why and how the person categorized their books together. I am interested in why you chose to place a timelife next to a wildlife. Why not share? Thus, Social tagging. Also, in order for a public universal system to work in needs to be organized in a way that everyone understands it. So I do think saving your bookmarks in sites like delicious is particular to my tastes, likes, etc. but allowing others to see the subjects and tags of my bookmarks probably allows someone else to understand who I am.
ReplyDeleteI have found myself bookmarking sites to Firefox as well as Delicious (since it asks every time if I want to save it to Delicious as well). The difference between my Firefox bookmark list and my Delicious list is that the Firefox list is not organized at all, is enormous, and takes forever to find a link. Delicious is good because you have to add tags which automatically organize things. This makes links easier to find later.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Melissa's response to your post - reading your post and her response put the usefulness of delicious into perspective for me. After first making a delicious account, I didn't really see how it could be beneficial to me - to me it seemed like a nuisance to store my bookmarks in a separate place then my bookmark bar, and I haven't had the need or desire to go searching through peoples tag's. But thinking about it in this way - the unique way we each organize things, and Pete's example of his stack of books - has given me a more legit reason to use delicious; I can now see how through looking at tags may result in a page I would never think relates to that tag.
ReplyDeleteI would have to say that I am probably more like your friend, who sounds like he falls under the OCD umbrella. I do think that the organizational sense I have in my everyday life has carried into my social tagging. When you tag things in delicious it automatically organizes it, so I don't find myself having to do it. If it didn't organize it automatically, it would be much harder for me to use. I probably would not use it if it was unorganized. I would just stick to my system that I have already created.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that I want to have my own social tagging habits. I feel if I do things the way I want to, I may tag things incorrectly. I feel that there has to be some type of uniformity for these sites to work correctly. When I tag a site I can not help but click all of the recommended tags so that information I found can be found by others easily.
ReplyDeleteTagging for me has always been a personal thing! I have always bookmarked a ton of different pages that range from yoga to vacations. Lets not forget art shows and recipes! The whole social tagging thing has opened my eyes to even more ways of people viewing information that we all are searching for online, but now, someone else might have found some other info that I have not come across. I think that social tagging for Art Education will be helpful to connect with other teachers in the field.
ReplyDeleteI just learned how to tag or bookmark anything. I guess you could say that I am a little behind the times when it comes to social tagging. I didn't even know it existed. But, I am excited to learn and to share whatever knowledge of obtain.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I love the fact that I can download movies though. For me, it's better than going to the movies and its a lot cheaper :)
I really liked what you had to say about social networking. I have a tense relationship with technology, while I like the shiny and the new, I firmly believe it's not going to fundamentally change the way we've always acted as humans...
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I do love being able to show my friend an article I just read with a twitch of a finger on a key. Heck, if she has Kindle too, I can send her a book.
The funny thing about all this technology is that my office is still full of books and piles of paper. Go figure.
I found a great case study pertaining to museum tagging that was conducted in Switzerland. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/papers/mannion/mannion.html gives great insight into the pros and cons of museum tagging. I hope this is a helpful aid to your midterm.
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