Is tagging a useful way to organize your digital resources and why?
Tagging is a great way to universally "mark" the things you've located or found for future reference. Before tagging, I used to save the web addresses of things I bookmarked on different computers and email them to myself for future reference. Very time consuming. Tagging helps fix this problem.
What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages? What is important to think about before assigning tags to bookmarks or other Internet content?
One huge advantage is the time that is saved. You can search for what you're looking for so quickly. We all know the fantastic feeling we get when we find just what we're looking for almost instantaneously. Our students love that feeling too! I believe it helps them to be independent learners, keeps them on task and motivates them to work hard at what they're doing. Tags are powerful! As far as disadvantages, sometimes you may have to search a few different key words to get exactly what you're looking for. A solution to this may lie in the hands of the tagger. Keep your tagging logical and simple. Let your "searchers" know some basic rules you've established for your tagging. These simple guidelines may help save some time and frustration.
I think of tags in the same way we used to think of library subject headings -- but with the library subject headings there were rules to follow when assigning the subjects and the patron had to know the subject terms (Sears subject terms were used most often). Librarians could help by using "see" and "see also" to redirect patrons who might be using natural language for subjects. Tagging is an improvement because there is no right or wrong and assigning tags and searching tags can by more intuitive. Good observations.
ReplyDelete