Insight team has prepared a comprehensive report that provides an introduction to social, collaborative tagging practices and sheds lights to commonly heard terms such as tags, tag cloud and folksonomies. The report allows readers into insights on their advantages and disadvantages, and gives examples of some emerging trends in the field. The report also offers concrete examples on the educational use of social tagging and bookmarking, it has an exhaustive reference list for further reading, and it offers a glossary of terms.

More in particularly, the report looks at the practice of social tagging and investigates how such a practice could be beneficial for teachers when they access learning resources in a repository. Thus, the report focuses on the use of metadata for cataloguing and retrieval purposes and investigates how unstructured metadata, such as user generated tags, could be used for that purpose. The aim is to demonstrate how structured and unstructured vocabularies can be complementary to one another and to be used to facilitate the access to large collections of learning resources.

An extended version of the report was prepared within the MELT project, of which the Insight Special Report was compiled by Research Analyst Riina Vuorikari.

The report is downloadable here as a [pdf]

MELT project: http://info.melt-project.eu/