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Description

Social tagging is a technology which has notedly established itself in the last few years as an application of the Web 2.0. This application has the potential to play a major role in knowledge management and computer-supported collaborative learning. Social tagging is the activity of individually annotating and classifying content (e.g., bookmarks, scientific articles, pictures or products) with keywords (tags) and includes a process of conjointly creating a new artifact of metadata for this content. The labeling of items with tags facilitates search processes and the retrieval of information on these platforms, for oneself but also for others.

The term social tagging refers to the social context in which tags are used and in which all members of a community can benefit from them. Most of the social tagging systems allow each user to tag all available resources independently. This way, all tags of a community can be aggregated, and a large set of metadata for resources emerges. The collection of tags represents the users' categorizations for items and builds a conjointly created artifact of keywords. This artifact of metadata is developed in a bottom-up process by numerous individuals (a "folksonomy").

The project's aim is to determine the influence of social tagging systems on individual information retrieval and learning processes by conducting both lab and field experiments. Based on models of memory and the Information Foraging Theory (Pirolli & Card, 1999), we investigate information search processes and information foraging behavior of users who navigate within social tagging systems. Furthermore, we are specifically interested in the influence of cognitive biases on navigation in social tagging systems and the influence of tags on learning.

Publications

• Held, C., & Cress, U. (in press). Learning by Foraging: The Impact of Social Tags on Knowledge Acquisition. In U. Cress, V. Dimitrova, & M. Specht (Eds.), Learning in the Synergy of Multiple Disciplines, Proceedings of the EC-TEL 2009, LNCS Vol. 5794. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
• Held, C. & Cress, U. (2008). Social Tagging aus kognitionspsychologischer Sicht. In B. Gaiser, T. Hampel, & S. Panke (Eds.), Good Tags - Bad Tags. Social Tagging in der Wissensorganisation (pp. 37-49). Münster: Waxmann.