Are tags from
Mars and
descriptors from
Venus?
A study on the ecology
of educational resource
metadata
ICWL 2009, Aachen
Aug 19 2009
Presenter: Riina Vuorikari

Presentation
• Introduction: purpose of metadata,
context and method
• Results and discussion: How do users
tag and what do they click? What do
expert indexers and repository
managers think of tags?
• Conclusions

Introduction: metadata for
learning resources
To describe resources.
“Descriptor” used for
indexing terms.
Usefulness for searchability

Typical LOR
=Learning Object LOR with tagging
Repository

Metadata ecology
• Describes the interrelation of
conventional metadata (e.g. Learning Object
Metadata) and social tags, and
• their interactions with the environment
– repository,
– resources,
– stakeholders (e.g. managers, metadata
indexers and the whole community of
users)

Learning Resource Exchange for schools
Learning Resource Exchange - Riina Vuorikari
http://lreforschools.eun.org
Conventional
search
«From
teachers to
teachers»
Tags in
multiple
languages
Ratings and
comments
by the European
Commission’s
eContentplus
Programme

Tagging to « keep found things found » and
Learning Resource Exchange - Riina Vuorikari
help to share with other users
Add to
Favourites
Add a tag

Method
• 234 users, 77 created bookmarks and
tags.
• Attention metadata captured on the
portal (user, resource, tags). Details in
Vuorikari and Koper, 2009.

Results:
users and tags
• Users interact
differently with
tags
• 33% of users tag,
• but 58% use tags
for searching

Results: how do users tag?
Average does not tell the whole truth!
• 20% of resources generated more than half of
all the bookmarks (80% had only one bookmark)
• 20% of resources had more than half of tags
associated with them them
• 20% of tags have been applied 63% of the
time

Results: how do users tag?
• Users tag in multiple languages in a
multilingual context, mostly
– in their mother tongue and
– in the language of the resource
– e.g. about 30 to 50% of tags are in En
• A medium correlation (r= 0.57) between
the language of the content and the
language of the tag

Results: “Thesaurus tags”
12

Results: “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

Results: what do users click?
• Tagcloud was used in 22% of all search
actions, users bookmarks 7%
• 11% of distinct tags were used for
retrieval purposes
• 20% of distinct tags generated 80% of
clicks

Results: Does the offer of tags
by users match the demand?
• The amount of clickstream (i.e. demand) on a
tag compared to how many times it had been
added by teachers (i.e. supply).
• number above 1 means that the tag has
generated more clickstream than tag
applications = “attractive” tag
• 21% of tags attractive and 24% equal supply
and demand - demonstrates the flexibility of
the system to adapt

Results: what do expert-indexers
think of tags?
• Indexers found user-generated tags
often
– factual and descriptive, similar to LOM
– suitable (i.e. clear and unambiguous) as
indexing keywords
• Tags a source of non-descriptors to help
retrieval, e.g. “efl” linked to Thesaurus terms
“English language” + “foreign language”

Results: what do LOR owners
think of tags?
• 25% of tags in the Repository case
study were deemed to add value to
existing indexing
• 75% somewhat redundant information
e.g.
– LOM 1.2: Title
– LOM 1.3: the language of the resource (English)
– LOM 5.2: resource type. Examples: photo, picture; exercises,
games; simulations; quiz, web quest
– LOM 5.7: the age group or the pupils being addresses (e.g. young
learners)

Conclusions and future work
• Numerous way of interplay exist
between conventional metadata and
social tags
• Tags allow multiple ways to interact with
the multilingual environment
– repository (e.g. new emerging ways
to navigate)

Interplay between descriptors
and tags
Tag
Descriptor
20

Emerging possibilities
• Tags create link-structures between users,
resources, tags and thesaurus descriptors
• These link-structures cross-references
resources across languages, curricula,
repositories, etc.
• Can offer more flexible ways to access
resources in a multilingual and cultural
context
21

social bookmarks
Metadata LOM tags folksonomy
ecology
multi-linguality social classification
thanks! for your attention
learning resources Tags
user communities
resource discovery
questions?
teachers social navigation
social traces
paths, trails
http://lreforschools.eun.org