Tags

The other day I was wondering what educational benefit tags might have. In what ways would learning about tags and learning to use tags benefit students.

Here's one thought: When I was in school we learned about animals and the kingdoms, species and whatever else (I'm not a science person and I definitely don't remember all of the terms) they belonged to. But there would be no reason that students could not labels animals with tags according to the different groups to which they belong. Teachers might want to use specific tags unique for their classroom, so for example I might use the tag ap01001 (and then fill in whatever the real tag would be.) When doing this students would only have objects identified by other students in the class come up when they looked for specific tags. To simply pull up everything with the label giraffe would pull up way too much at times. At other times that might be very useful. At still other times teachers could collaboratively develop tag terms so that items classified by a few classes would come up. Even better, students could collaboratively develop tag codes. Indeed, rather than telling students how to label animals teachers could ask them to develop their own labeling system.

Students in a history class could use tagging to align different themes with different chronological eras. Obviously the same theme would be used multiple times. In a geography class different geographical characteristics could be aligned with different places. Such activities could definitely help students develop deeper understandings of the world.

As I sit here right now, I'm just beginning to think about how categorizing with labels in this way would be particularly useful for students. I'm very confident that it would be. For example, categorizing might provide students with an ability to develop complicated schematic systems. Such systems would enable them to think in complicated ways about the world in which they live.

As the writing here likely demonstrates I'm at the very beginning stages of thinking about how tagging could benefit teaching and learning in the classroom. But, I think this kind of a discussion is worth having. For, I'd like to think that these are the kinds of discussions that will align the widgets of Web 2.0 with disciplinary objectives. These are the kinds of discussions that will hopefully enable teachers to help students use Web 2.0 to learn to think at ever complicated levels.

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