Cutting through the clouds

I have just attended an excellent, thought provoking session here at ICL 2008 this morning on tagclouds and reflective learnining. It was presented by Christian Glahn, who works at the Open University of the Netherlands. Here are my notes, which may be a little unstructured, but hey - this is blog reporting on the fly...

Christian is investigating the use of social bookmarking to promote reflective learning and says we need to give learner support in unstructured learning environments. What are they? They contain non-explicit learning objectives and/or ill-defined learning materials or topics. When people tag things online in these environments, he said, we don't know anything about their background, interests, etc. so it is difficult to support them fully.

Creating personal tag clouds can encourage people to reflect on their learning. Previous research on the use of tag clouds includes Millen and Feinburg who highlighted the social dimensions. Wordle tag clouds are mainly aesthetic and do not appear to have any pedagogical value. What is the personal benefit of tag clouds? Well, no research can be found on this topic, he said. His design study uses Rescope and is based on his own autobiographical reporting, based upon a concept not a hypothesis. What are the effects of tagclouds on reflective learning? Delicious tags used to create links using keywords. Version 1 of Rescope was applied to show frequency of use of each hyperlinked tag. Have a look at Version 2 of Rescope which uses colour as well as size of font to indicate frequency of use. He is using a combination of global tag aggregator and recent tag aggregator which feed into a visualisation tool, resulting in a merging of up to date use. Recent tagging activities can also enable reflective learning to be supported. Helps to provide better focus for searching the web and learning from content. Tag cloud monitoring can show changes in reading and searching for content on the web. http://lnx-otecexp-005v.ou.nl/rescope/ How can we measure this kind of activity? Through Twitter microblogging - to gather ongoing live data about student learning activities? Enables searching over a history of tagging activity.

There are of course several questions left unanswered, and Christian's research is ongoing, but I thought this was a refreshing change to some of the other papers I have seen here so far at ICL, which tend to focus on static, web based delivery. Christian's research looks at dynamic social bookmarking tools and he will surely come up with some interesting findings, especially as he is working with Marcus Specht and Rob Koper....