Using the web bookmarking service of del.icio.us may improve the ability of students to gather research and grow critical skills towards interpreting documents. Why? The internet revolution has contributed to a new problem, one that students of my generation and older are unfamiliar with: too much information. It used to be that students from High School through College were forced to try and find information, like gems hidden in deep rocky fissures, in places like the bottom basement of the city library--even having to travel to find what our research demanded. Tenacity and determination were the demands, selectivity and discernment were limited to the necessary. The student of today is faced with a different dilemma: finding the gem in a seemingly never ending pile of gems stretching to the heavens with lumps of coal and plastic jewels throughout. The student must now practice a level of discernment and should employ a criticism that would have been considered snobbish to even the most successful of researchers in the past. Enter the taggers.
Amongst the many tools students are racing to employ is the criticism of the cloud, the wisdom of the demos. In other words, social bookmarking. For those who never knew what they were, the new use of "tags" is an attempt to personally classify and evaluate information by subjectively evaluating and classifying material whether it be a news article, a website, or even music; anything! Young and old find and "mark" information on their computers, the internet and anywhere they can with "tags" that are relevant to them and then share them with others either on websites that collect the tags or within the actual files themselves. Places on a map can be "geo-tagged", pictures can be embedded digitally with invisible tags and search engines pull them out when they are loaded, sites can be labeled and gathered according to these external trappings and--here's the clincher--compared with the subjective evaluations and qualifiers that others have used! Tags can be visually represented many ways, including the ubiquitous "cloud" that gives more prominence to sources as they receive more use by increasing their size relative to other sources. Here's where the use comes in, theoretically, if enough subjective "votes" are cast in favor (or out of) for any item of information the discernment of the observer is amplified and reassured if it seems to have been affirmed by this democracy. (It even aids those who do not contribute as a potential launching point to begin their research.)
Where this reviewing becomes an interesting option for new pedagogy is in seeing this process and participation as the unseen process that a student must participate in in order to viably gather information from the pile: it is the criticism not only to evaluate sources of information but to evaluate the evaluation itself. Unknowingly, the internet has forced a level of metacognition that many students aren't even aware they are employing but they all are trying to find solutions for. But is this any different than many of the peer review process that we employ in our classes. Or, the process we ask them to go through when they review their own papers for revision, etc. No, it isn't any different. Taggers are just employing the same process to help them in the pile of "new" research. This offers a unique avenue of evaluation for the teacher that is trying to not only teach students to research but also to be aware of valid criticism and invalid, appropriate research and inappropriate. Anyone that has seen any Velcro Farm website knows that this is imperative. And so do the students, even if they don't know. Tagging is just "cool," its just "how we roll." As a teacher, this offers an excellent new way to evaluate student's research abilities and their ability to critically analyze their sources. I plan on implementing something to employ this technique almost immediately and I am impressed with some of the work done by others to explore this avenue.
For an excellent look at some of the work already out there a good introduction to its possibilities can by found with Dr. Jamie Wood over at the University of Sheffield. And yes, I did find this while I did some "tag searching" on this very subject.
Do you know of any similar tools being tried out? Have you tried any yet? Share them in the comments!
Amongst the many tools students are racing to employ is the criticism of the cloud, the wisdom of the demos. In other words, social bookmarking. For those who never knew what they were, the new use of "tags" is an attempt to personally classify and evaluate information by subjectively evaluating and classifying material whether it be a news article, a website, or even music; anything! Young and old find and "mark" information on their computers, the internet and anywhere they can with "tags" that are relevant to them and then share them with others either on websites that collect the tags or within the actual files themselves. Places on a map can be "geo-tagged", pictures can be embedded digitally with invisible tags and search engines pull them out when they are loaded, sites can be labeled and gathered according to these external trappings and--here's the clincher--compared with the subjective evaluations and qualifiers that others have used! Tags can be visually represented many ways, including the ubiquitous "cloud" that gives more prominence to sources as they receive more use by increasing their size relative to other sources. Here's where the use comes in, theoretically, if enough subjective "votes" are cast in favor (or out of) for any item of information the discernment of the observer is amplified and reassured if it seems to have been affirmed by this democracy. (It even aids those who do not contribute as a potential launching point to begin their research.)
Where this reviewing becomes an interesting option for new pedagogy is in seeing this process and participation as the unseen process that a student must participate in in order to viably gather information from the pile: it is the criticism not only to evaluate sources of information but to evaluate the evaluation itself. Unknowingly, the internet has forced a level of metacognition that many students aren't even aware they are employing but they all are trying to find solutions for. But is this any different than many of the peer review process that we employ in our classes. Or, the process we ask them to go through when they review their own papers for revision, etc. No, it isn't any different. Taggers are just employing the same process to help them in the pile of "new" research. This offers a unique avenue of evaluation for the teacher that is trying to not only teach students to research but also to be aware of valid criticism and invalid, appropriate research and inappropriate. Anyone that has seen any Velcro Farm website knows that this is imperative. And so do the students, even if they don't know. Tagging is just "cool," its just "how we roll." As a teacher, this offers an excellent new way to evaluate student's research abilities and their ability to critically analyze their sources. I plan on implementing something to employ this technique almost immediately and I am impressed with some of the work done by others to explore this avenue.
For an excellent look at some of the work already out there a good introduction to its possibilities can by found with Dr. Jamie Wood over at the University of Sheffield. And yes, I did find this while I did some "tag searching" on this very subject.
First year students in History used the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to develop an online resource list for their weekly seminars over a semester in 2008. This has potential to develop students’ web-literacy and to allow staff to observe the reading which students have been doing outside of class.
Do you know of any similar tools being tried out? Have you tried any yet? Share them in the comments!
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