Tag games: Using tags in professional and language development

 

Vance Stevens, Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi

More about Vance: http://advanceducation.blogspot.com

 

Presented at BrazTESOL, Sao Paulo Brazil, July 21, 2010

See the slides at

http://www.slideshare.net/vances/tag-games-using-tags-in-professional-and-language-development 

The session was recorded by Willy Cardoso in uStream http://www.ustream.tv/channel/eitosp

(technicial difficulties at first; sound comes on after 22 minutes ;-)

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/8416770 

 

Here is what participants will do during the presentation

 

We'll try the following materials to see what we can learn about BrazTESOL10

You can also try: writingmatrix, webheads, webheadsinaction, evomlit and other tags you wish to explore.

 

What are tags?

 

• Taxonomic heirarchical systems are top down, pre-ordaiined, like the Dewey Decimal System 
• Folksonomic systems are created by users of those systems as they use them, via wisdom of the crowds

 

Tagging is applying categories or labels to items as we use them in systems that can aggregate those tags  

 

 

Delicious

http://delicious.com can be used to communicate to others via tags YOU place on URLs you bookmark.  For example, if I want to accumulate in one place URLs pertaining to this session, i can tag them braztesol10.  You can see them at these URLs sites I have tagged.

 

• This bookmark, http://delicious.com/vancestevens/braztesol10 shows all the sites that user vancestevens has tagged braztesol10
• This bookmark, http://delicious.com/tag/braztesol10 shows all the sites that ALL delicious  users have tagged braztesol10

How to use this in class: Create a class tag.  It should be unique (one that no one else is using, like braztesol10).  In Delicious, tag items you'd like students to see with your class tag.  Let students know the delicious link where they can go to see the latest links.  If you use the link to your account, they can see what YOU want them to see.  If they go to the general link, they will see sites others have tagged (in other words, they can tag sites to call your attention to them).

 

You can use Delicious to have students communicate to each other sites they have found in the course of reseaching collaborative projects

 

You can use Diigo in a similar way.  As Carla Arena pointed out during the session, you can port all your Delicious bookmarks to Diigo and set up Diigo so when you post there it constantly updates Delicious.

 

In general, the following work on tags that OTHERS (the content creators) place on object they put online.

 

Flickr

 

Some people are tagging photos from the conference BrazTESOL 2010 'braztesol'

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=braztesol&m=text

 

Others are using the "officia"l tag 'BrazTESOL10'

http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=braztesol10&m=text

(in the end, the 'official' tag is the one that people use)

 

Users will often tag their photos (everyone should).

If the pictures are creative commons, you can tag them yourself, even if you're not the owner,

and they will show up in Flickr searches.

 

How to use this in class:

•  You can use TagGalaxy at http://taggalaxy.com/ to get an attractive display of your tagged items.Try it with both 'braztesol' and 'braztesol10'
• You can make screen shots of Tag Galaxy images and use them in logos, such as at
  http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/ 

 

Google

 

• Google image search at http://images.google.com/ is sometimes productive
  Try: braztesol,  braz tesol, and braz tesol 10
• Google Blog Search on braztesol:
  http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=braztesol&btnG=Search+Blogs 

 

Twitter

 

The twitter search on braztesol10:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=brazTESOL10

 

From this listing I've compiled the following list:

http://twitter.com/#list/VanceS/braztesol

(I just added each person who tweets using #braztesol10 to my braztesol list)

 

Spezify

 

This site is cool:

http://spezify.com/#/braztesol10

 

A similar site is Addictomatic:

http://addictomatic.com/topic/braztesol10

 

Abstract:

This workshop empowers participants to utilize tagging in professional development and language learning. Participants learn how students can find one another anywhere in the world by agreeing on a common tag, like 'writingmatrix'. We explore several tools for retrieving tagged content online and see how this applies to language learning.

300 word session description:
This session introduces the concept of tags and enables participants to explore their power in language learning. The session explains tags in familiar terms (e.g. photos on Facebook). It then describes a project where teachers around the world had their students create content online in blogs, and then find one another anywhere in the world using the tag, 'writingmatrix'. This project left many artifacts online for participants to examine.

To show how it works we play a number of tag “games”. I (and others) take pictures at the conference in advance of the workshop and tag them on Flickr. Participants find them and create attractive visuals from them using Taggalaxy. I show other web sites where objects can be tagged and we explore online tools to find these tagged objects.

I show how these sites can be used to manage collaborative projects and to research topics apart from familiar Google searches through methods utilizing tags. The presentation itself will create a set of tagged objects that participants can retrieve later through techniques learned at the workshop. For example, the presentation will be available on Slideshare.net and tagged so it can be found using the tools above.

Participants learn how these concepts can be used with students. Delicious can be used to channel knowledge for a group of students or online collaborators. To illustrate the point, all of the links introduced are tagged so that participants can to retrieve them via their common tag from the perspective of students. Through exploration and using the tools to recapture what they have themselves learned, teachers leave the workshop with a greater understanding of tagging and its possibilities in language learning.

 

Find a writeup of a previous rendition of this demonstration here:

https://curiousvance.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/powerful-ideas-and-tools-for-getting-the-most/ 

 

There was lots of Twitter feedback during the session: