Blogging, Social Bookmarking, and Tagging (Social Blog-tagging?)

I started thinking about this while reading chapter 6 of the Richardson text, “The Social Web.” In this chapter, Richardson (2010) highlights the power of social bookmarking systems by explaining the functions of “tagging.” “The idea is that in working with your community of researchers, new tagging systems will emerge and become accepted that will allow us all to participate in the process” (p. 91).

I have been using Delicious social bookmarking site for a few years. At first it was just an easy way to keep a web-based “favorites” list wherever I go and not have to worry about whether it was saved on the computer I happened to be working on. I didn’t even pay attention to the tags. Then I figured out what the site was really for, and started using it even more than the Google search engine. It is especially handy when I do find a site on Google. I bookmark it, tag it, and then see what else Delicious turns up with my same chosen tags. If done right, it can cut through the Google clutter.

So I wondered, can you do the same with blogs, not by tagging bookmarks that lead to them, but by tagging them specifically? I found out it is done quite often, but mainly to optimize the chances that the blog will come up on a search engine. After investigating the process, it seems to me that current methods for tagging blogs are not nearly as easy and user-friendly as tagging a link in a social bookmarking site. Delicious makes it so easy, even providing suggested tags based on the page contents. Here is one explanation of how to add “meta-tags” to the code of a blog post. Here is one specifically about writing the code for Blogger meta-tags. And here is an actual code generator someone made for Blogger to simplify the tagging process. As you can see, it is not yet at the simple “one-click” stage like social bookmarking.

But what if it was? Think about the potential for blogging in the classroom if students and teachers could quickly add meta-tags to blog posts. I’m just thinking out loud, but imagine an “enclosed” blogging network within a grade, school, or school system where information was shared through blogs and tagging? Teachers could share notes and lessons easily just by copying and pasting them in blogs and tagging the keywords. Then students and other teachers could find them quickly without having to search the web, sift through website menus, or even follow the blogs on RSS. The information would be more “on-demand.” The possibilities for student collaboration seem endless. Also, we could think about assessment in a whole new way. What if as part of portfolio-based assessment, we simply required that students add certain tags to their blogs. Then when it came time to assess their work, we could instantly pull it up via the tags? We wouldn’t have to fret so much about how to organize all of the “digital paper” or files into their portfolios. I’m just thinking out loud here, but take it a step further and add RSS feeds that are based on the tags themselves (like in Delicious), and you have an automated “drop-box.” Just some thoughts.

References:

Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin