Social tagging and

learning resources in a multilingual context

CELSTEC/NELL colloquium

June 4 2009

Riina Vuorikari

Presentation

• Introduction: who, context of my PhD work

• Ecology– social search– metadata ecology

• Crossing contexts– Cross-repository tagcloud

Intro: who?

Riina Vuorikari

• Master’s in Education (Finland)• DEA in Hypermedia (France)• now PhD student as "buitenpromovendus”• Since 2000 worked in European Schoolnet

with TEL topics

European Schoolnet (EUN)

• 31 Ministries of Education (MoE) in Europe

• Created in 1997

• Leads the way in bringing about change in schooling through the use of new technology

– Digital content; school collaboration; policy making

• Stichting Kennisnet Ict op School as Dutch member

Digital Resources and LORs exist on local and national level

• Content in different languages

• Comply to local/national curriculum and educational standards (especially in K-12)

• Variety of pedagogical approaches

• Sharing of resources and/or metadata on the repository level (e.g. federation of repositories, harvesting metadata)

Typical “old school” LOR =Learning Object Repository

• Metadata used for indexing and describing resources

• Library background

• Studying the use and reuse through different metrics (e.g. downloads, views)

• Digital libraries, datamining, web metrics, attention metadata,..

Typical “old school” LOR

• Reuse around 20% (Ochoa, 2008)

• Resources seldom have link-structures to cross-reference -> use of PageRank type algorithms impossible!

• Often not found by Google either

QuickTime™ and aBMP decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

New kid on the block: tagging

Triple (user, item, tag)• (item,tag) describing the

item that they are related to

• (item, user) as a parameter of the interaction between a user and item

• (user,tag) as part of a user model

• Activity Theory as a conceptual framework to investigate the LORs and communities

– LOR as a single system, rather than as a loose set of instruments, subjects, objects and outcomes

• LORs as participatory environments where knowledge is co-constructed rather than exchanged and consumed

– (1) the social origin of learning; (2) the mediation of learning by tools; and (3) the goal- oriented nature of learning activities.

Learning Resource Exchange - Riina VuorikariLearning Resource Exchange for schools http://lreforschools.eun.org

03/03/2009

Conventional search

«From teachers to teachers»

Tags in multiple

languages

Ratings and comments

by the European Commission’s

eContentplus Programme

Learning Resource Exchange - Riina VuorikariTagging as a conceptual tool for co-construction of knowledge

Add to Favourites

Add a tag

Learning Resource Exchange - Riina VuorikariTagging for co-construction of knowledge

Digital

traces to follow!

by Stiphy

“Social

” makes

trails

visible

..

and

guides

the way

Activity system (Cole and Engeström, 1991)

How can SIR help discovery of resources in a multilingual

context?

Social Information Retrieval: e.g. social navigation, ranking, recommender systems

Study the system “ecology”: • How does tagging in multilingual context affect on the

discovery of resources? • How does tagging interplay with LOM?

Crossing contexts:• Tagging to help discovery across contexts

Cross-boundary use of educational resources

• Existing literature cites many barriers,

• Curious if it does exist and to what extent?

• Notably lower than general reuse

Vuorikari, R., Koper, R,. (submitted) Evidence of cross-boundary use and reuse of digital educational resources. http://dspace.ou.nl/handle/1820/1709

Resources with user tag «interactive» Tag

«interactive»

Exploratory study into tagging: resources through tags

Vuorikari, R., & Ochoa, X. (2009). Exploratory Analysis of the Main Characteristics of Tags and Tagging of Educational Resources in a Multi-lingual Context. Journal of Digital Information, 10(2). http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/447.

Resource provider

Tag «optics»

Exploratory study into tagging: content from providers connected through tags

Austria

Hungary

Finland

Resource that «Travels well»

Exploratory study into tagging: users from different countries connected through tags

Ecology: social search

Attention metadata; 82 users; 2,5 monthsVuorikari, R., & Koper, R. (2009). Ecology of social search for learning

resources. Campus-Wide Information Systems, 26(4). http://hdl.handle.net/1820/1799

Users interact differently with tags (*)

- tag but don’t use for search- tag and search- only search- don’t tag nor search

Hypotheses to be tested

• H1: Can search strategies based on Social Information Retrieval (SIR) make the discovery of learning resources more efficient for users?

• H2: Can Community browsing help users discover more cross-boundary resources?

Ecology: interplay between tags and metadata?

(*) Vuorikari, R., Sillaots, M., Panzavolta, S., & Koper, R. (2009). Are tags from Mars and descriptors from Venus? A study on the ecology of educational resource metadata. In Advances in Web-Based Learning - ICWL 2009, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 5686). Springer. hdl.handle.net/1820/1849

25

“Thesaurus tags”• Characteristics:

– 11.3% of distinct user-generated tags exist in the LRE multilingual Thesaurus – 30.6% of tag applications

• Popular:– On average, these tags were reused 11.8 times (other tags 2.5 times)

• Add properties to tags – e.g. relation to a concept in multilingual Thesaurus, – language

• Add connections, e.g. all the other resources related to this thesaurus term

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Link-structures that did not exist

before: descriptor - LOM

Link-structures that did not exist before: different tagging platforms

• Comparison of 3 different tagging tools• Comparison of tags in educational context

from 5 different platforms

Vuorikari, R., Poldoja, H., & Koper, R. (2009). Comparison of educational tagging systems – any chances of interplay? To appear in IJTEL

Tag-item structure interesting for social navigation across platforms

Vuorikari, R., Poldoja, H., & Koper, R. (2009). Comparison of educational tagging systems – any chances of interplay? To appear in IJTEL

Cross-repository tagcloud

• Tags create interplay between repositories

• Builds on social interactions among users in terms of co-construction of tags

• From institutional and private resource collections

Cross-repository tagcloud

• But also: Tags create number of underlying link-structures between content in heterogeneous content platforms and thus opens novel ways for PageRank-type algorithms for better cross-language discovery

Conclusions

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are needed to see this picture.

Epistemological level- how tagging can support discovery- creation of new ways to interact with the discovery process, i.e. SIR

Methodological level- new methods for structuring the communication in the context: tags

Social assistance level-new forms of assistance to correspond better to communities needs (e.g. own vocabularies, topical and lingual tag clouds)

social bookmarks Metadata LOM tags folksonomy

ecology multi-linguality social classification

thanks! for your attentionlearning resources Tags

user communitiesresource discovery

questions? teachers social navigation

social tracespaths, trails

http://elgg.ou.nl/rvu