We should do lots of tagging in school

http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_09/tagging-cognitive.html

One of the rapidly emerging trends in the online world is social software. In the context of schools and constructuivism, this is enormously exciting. There is also a lot of talk about education needing to focus on higher order thinking skills. Skills in categorising and analysing are important.

A cognitive analysis of tagging provides an excellent description/comparison of the process of tagging vs categorisation. It also talks about the social nature of tagging and it was this discussion that made me link how we learn in a constructivist environment with this tagging process. When we tag items using tools like del.icio.us and flickr we also get to see how others have tagged the same item or alternatively to see the items that others have used the same tag for.

I guess the reason that we should be doing lots of this in school is because it

• is an important information management skill
• makes us make links with other pieces of infomration and concepts
• is social in nature and we get to learn from the way others have tagged the items