The document discusses using social tagging to help discover learning resources across different languages and repositories. It proposes that tagging can create new link structures between resources and support social information retrieval approaches to improve cross-boundary discovery. The author's PhD research analyzes the ecology of tagging, how it interacts with traditional metadata, and how it can support multilingual resource sharing.

1. Social tagging and learning resources in a multilingual context CELSTEC/NELL colloquium June 4 2009 Riina Vuorikari

2. Presentation Introduction: who, context of my PhD work Ecology social search metadata ecology Crossing contexts Cross-repository tagcloud

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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)

6. 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,..

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. Learning Resource Exchange for schools http://lreforschools.eun.org Learning Resource Exchange - Riina Vuorikari 03/03/2009 Conventional search «From teachers to teachers» Tags in multiple languages Ratings and comments by the European Commission’s eContentplus Programme

11. Tagging as a conceptual tool for co-construction of knowledge Learning Resource Exchange - Riina Vuorikari Add to Favourites Add a tag

12. Tagging for co-construction of knowledge Learning Resource Exchange - Riina Vuorikari Digital traces to follow!

13. by Stiphy “ Social” makes trails visible..

14. and guides the way

15. Activity system (Cole and Engeström, 1991)

16. 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

17. 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

18. Exploratory study into tagging: resources through tags Resources with user tag «interactive» Tag «interactive» 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.

19. Resource provider Tag «optics» Exploratory study into tagging: content from providers connected through tags

20. Exploratory study into tagging: users from different countries connected through tags Austria Hungary Finland Resource that «Travels well»

21. Ecology: social search Attention metadata; 82 users; 2,5 months Vuorikari, R., & Koper, R. (2009). Ecology of social search for learning resources. Campus-Wide Information Systems, 26(4). http://hdl.handle.net/1820/1799

22. Users interact differently with tags (*) - tag but don’t use for search - tag and search - only search - don’t tag nor search

23. 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? Yes No

24. 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

26. Link-structures that did not exist before: descriptor - LOM

27. 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

28. 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

29. 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

30. 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

31. Conclusions

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

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

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

35. 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://elgg.ou.nl/rvu