Tag, you're it!

Originally posted 4/1/2010

I was just playing around with Tag Galaxy (try it, it's a blast!) and it got me thinking about how important it is that we teachers recognize and appreciate the shift in how information is being organized.

The following is from amazon.com's review of David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous:

Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.

And here's the professor himself, explaining the concept.

It's worth watching (or reading the book), but if you're short on time, the basic concept is that we were brought up with a hierarchical organization of information- so, for example, to research The Beatles, our path might have been something like Arts->Entertainment->Music->Musical Groups->English Musical Groups->The Beatles.

...but The Beatles belong to more than one "category" of information.

The Beatles are: a rock band, a collection of songs, a haircut, the British Invasion, John Lennon's group, Yoko One, Liverpool, etc. , etc.  This is where tagging comes in.  Tagging allows us to attach all of these descriptions to the Beatles.

Earlier this year,  we  switched our school e-mail to Gmail.  All of the sudden, we didn't have to choose whether a particular e-mail belonged in the  "Curriculum" folder, the "To Do" folder, or the "Pedagogy" folder- with tagging (it's actually referred to as "labeling" in GMail), we put it in all those "folders."   And, since we can search by tags, we find it when we look for either Curriculum or Pedagogy (or To Do).

Let's help students become good "taggers."