Social tagging
of
http://lre.eun.org
open educational resources
in the MELT Project
Riina Vuorikari
European Schoolnet

Social tagging
of
http://lre.eun.org
open educational resources
WHAT? Give me an example!
- Let's look into bookmarks

Social tagging
of
http://lre.eun.org
open educational resources
And what is there for teachers?
- Can it really help them to find
digital resources?

Bookmarks
 Readily available at
your browser
http://lre.eun.org
 A good way to get
back to what you
once found
 and organise your life
according to folders..

.. if you remember in which folder it
was stored in?
http://lre.eun.org

Proliferation of web-based services
for sharing digital items
http://lre.eun.org

Proliferation of web-based services
for sharing digital items
http://lre.eun.org

...times are changing
http://lre.eun.org

Sharing digital items
through tags and a tag cloud
http://lre.eun.org

Cues and trails from other users
http://lre.eun.org

Social tagging of resources
in multilingual Europe
 Addition to the traditional LOM
http://lre.eun.org
 By users interacting with the portal, resources
and other users
 Four main tools:
– social bookmarking and tags in multiple
languages
– ratings of usefulness
– pedagogical annotations (used in learning events)
– levels of user engagement when interacting with
the system (what is viewed, how many times,..)

Social bookmarking
 To store, organise, share and search
bookmarks of web pages. Keep found things
http://lre.eun.org
found!
 Users organise bookmarks with informal tags
(instead of the traditional folders)
 Bookmarks are usually public and shared
 Find like-minded users with similar interest.

What is a tag?
 Metadata externally applied to an item
http://lre.eun.org
 Can be used for sorting or managing
 A hook for aggregating
 Provides identifier and/or description
 Personal marker to help associate with the
resource
by partly Thomas Vander Wal

Bookmark is
a triple (user, resource, {tags})
http://lre.eun.org

A great navigational aid to
discover resources!
http://lre.eun.org

http://lre.eun.org
Digital
traces to follow!

More ways for social navigation
http://lre.eun.org
Discover resources
through tags in
multiple languages

“Social”
makes
http://lre.eun.org
trails
visible..
by Stiphy

http://lre.eun.org
and
shows
where
to do go

Can tags and bookmarks be used to
http://lre.eun.org
connect users cross national and
language borders?

Social bookmarking in multi-lingual
environment
http://lre.eun.org

.. allows new ways to discover both
resources and people!
http://lre.eun.org

“Travel well” learning resources
 item bookmarked is of different language than
user's mother tongue and/or
http://lre.eun.org
 item has tags in different language(s) than that
of the item language and/or
 item is from a different country than from
where the user is from

Are tags found useful?
http://lre.eun.org
Vuorikari, R., Ochoa, X., Duval, E. Analysis of User Behavior on MultilingualTagging of
Learning Resources. In Workshop proceedings of the EC-TEL conference:
SIRTEL07 (EC-TEL ’07) (Crete, Greece, September 17-20, 2007)

Are tags found useful?
http://lre.eun.org
Tags, produced with no outlay,
show an encouraging and
potential gain in overall
usefulness!
Vuorikari, R., Ochoa, X., Duval, E. Analysis of User Behavior on MultilingualTagging of
Learning Resources. In Workshop proceedings of the EC-TEL conference:
SIRTEL07 (EC-TEL ’07) (Crete, Greece, September 17-20, 2007)

Does the language matter?
http://lre.eun.org
 Need for better ways to identify the language
– Give rules (if the user first preferred languages is..,
then..)
– Automate the recognition of languages
– Out-source it to users

“Travel well” tags
 About 15% of tags contain a general term, a
http://lre.eun.org
name, place, etc. that is easily understood
without translation
 e.g. AIDS, software, EU, Euroopa, Europa,
europe, Evropa, geograafia, Pythagoras,
algebra, arhitektura, astronomie, Austrálie,
bakterie, biotechnologie, dinozaurai, drama,
formules, fotosyntéza, ..

What's the point of travel well tags?
 If those tags need no translation or language
http://lre.eun.org
filtering to be understood, and
 ..if they can be identified:
 We can be sure to show at least some tags
to users
– whose language preferences we don't know, and
– in whose language there are no tags or keywords
available.

Benefits of social tagging and
content enrichment
http://lre.eun.org
 Will offer a richer view on how resources are
used (viewed, tagged, shared, used)
 Who interacts with resources cross
(inter)national and linguistic borders
 How resources are taken up and how do
users enrich your content

User engaging with resources
Steps taken:
- views page
http://lre.eun.org
- views metadata
- bookmarks and
tags
- rates
Shareable with others through
Contextual Attention Metadata
framework!

How do users tag?
 Most posts consisted Percent of tags/posting
of only one tag Onetag 79%
2 tags 15%
http://lre.eun.org
3 tags 4%
4 tags 1%
5 tags 0.39%
 More than half of 6 tags 0.23%
tags were used just 7 tags 0.08%
once (54%)
No guided
tagging in this
 Only about 10% of
pilot!
tags were reused
more than twise This may
change.

Semantic analysis of tags
 Factual tags 63%
(Golder: item topics, kinds
of item, category
http://lre.eun.org
refinements)
 Subjective tags 29%
( Golder: item qualities)
 Personal tags 3%
(Golder: item ownership,
self-reference, tasks
organisation)
 5% other
 Sen et al. (2006).

Why tag categories?
 In Sen et al. (2006) it
was found that tags
of different categories
http://lre.eun.org
can be useful for
different tasks
 In our case it is too
early to say anything,
but ...we'll have an
eye on it!

Metadata LOM tags
social bookmarks
folksonomy social tagging
multi-linguality social classification
http://lre.eun.org
thanks! for your attention
learning resources user communities
discover resources and items
questions?
teachers social navigation
social traces
paths, trails
http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~hmdb/infovis/calibrate/calibrate.html
flock