Web 2.0 concepts explained: Folksonomy and tags according to our first year students
I finished my first semester of teaching in July and the final tests from our first year students revealed some interesting web 2.0 insights. Students were asked to define a few web 2.0 terms besides answering more in depth questions. We read and graded over 300 exams and I took some notes while grading. Some answers obviously showed a lack of studying but other answers made me look at things I take for granted differently, for example:
Folksonomy: The term used for the collective filtering of webpages through the practice of “tagging.” Example: Tagging YouTube movies
This student has seen tags on YouTube but has not quite grasped what they are or do. The answer is an interesting mix of the concept ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ and tagging and tags as links that may be used to filter.
Folksonomy: a website that relies on user generated content to exist.
Folksonomy: Economic model that works with tags. Example: Tags = rating
Folksonomy: Economy based on knowledge
Once again these looks like a lucky guess but then again if you think of YouTube or Amazon they are not that far fetched. The rating concept may also come from tagclouds with weighed tags that could be interpreted as ratings. The more often an object is tagged with the same term, the more relevant it is. Tags as recommendations.
Folksonomy: the way things are being found on websites with the use tags.
What surprised me most is that a lot of students described tags as a type of hyperlinks. Tags are often links but tags in itself are not hyperlinks. However, most of the examples of tag use we showed the students on Last.fm, Flickr and YouTube are hyperlinks. The practice and use of tags have transformed tags into a type of hyperlinks. Tagclouds have transformed tags into a type of recommendation and filtering tool.
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