In this series, Nicky Hockly explains aspects of technology which some people may be embarrassed to confess that they don’t really understand. In this article, she explains tags and tagging.
1. Tag? Isn’t that a game?
Although tag is a children’s game, when we talk about technology we use it in the sense of ‘label’. So just as a clothes tag will give you information about the price and size of a piece of clothing, a tag is a virtual label that gives information about an ‘object’ on the internet. Adding tags is known as tagging.
2. Can you give me specific examples?
Imagine you are an amateur nature photographer who wants to share your work with the world – by doing so you might sell your photos or get some commissions. You upload a selection of your best photos to the photo-sharing site Flickr (www.flickr.com) to make them widely available. But amongst all the millions of Flickr photos, how will people actually find yours? Tagging can help. For each of your photos you add tags – labels or keywords – which reflect the content, such as nature, bird, flight, lake, etc. A picture researcher looking through Flickr for a specific type of nature photo, and using some of these keywords, is then more likely to find your work.
Let’s take this idea into the classroom. Imagine your students have produced slideshows related to a classroom research project, and have uploaded these to the internet. How can you share their work with the world? Tagging each slideshow with relevant keywords will help other teachers or students find it. And imagine that you have a blog and have written a post about this specific slideshow project and how you carried it out with your students. How can other teachers find your blog post and try out your lesson idea with their own students? Again, adding tags to your post will make it much more likely to appear in internet searches.
So, tags provide ‘metadata’ about online information. This helps categorise or organise the information, and so makes it easier to classify or find. Any piece of virtual information can be tagged. You can tag blog posts, videos, images, software programs, online events, articles …
3. I’ve heard of ‘tag clouds’. What are they?
Let’s look again at the blog example above. You wrote a blog post about your students’ project and tagged it with words like slideshow, project, ELT, etc so that other teachers could find it. In fact, you’ve already carried out several slideshow projects with different classes on various topics and have several blog posts about how to carry each of these out. On your blog you’ve added a tag cloud ‘widget’ (or program) that collects the tags that you’ve used in the posts in your blog, and displays them as hyperlinks in the form of a cloud. Teachers visiting your blog will see the tag cloud and can click on any of the items in it to see a list of the posts tagged with that specific word. If they’d like to read more about your various slideshow projects, they can click on the word slideshow in your blog’s tag cloud and they will see all your other posts about slideshows.
Here’s an example of a tag cloud from my own blog (in this case the posts are mainly concerned with ICT, m-learning, etc). The larger the word in the cloud, the more frequently that tag is used – this means there are more posts on that particular topic in the blog. By looking at a tag cloud, you can quickly and easily see what topics are covered in a blog. By clicking on the tag, you can go straight to the posts carrying that tag. A blog tag cloud will keep evolving, reflecting the tags you add to (or remove from) your blog posts.
4. How do I know what tags to use?
The beauty of tagging is that you choose the tags you think are most relevant. You may even want to add tags in more than one language. For your nature photos on Flickr (see above), if your photos of birds are from a lake in Spain, you may want to add a few tags in Spanish. Then anyone searching in Spanish (for a Spanish nature magazine, perhaps) will be more likely to find your photos.
You will often find the word folksonomies used in conjunction with tagging. Whereas a taxonomy is a fairly rigid hierarchy of terms applied to something, a folksonomy is created and modified by users. Knowing how to tag and contribute to folksonomies is part of a set of increasingly essential digital literacies, skills needed to navigate our digital world. Tagging literacy includes not just knowing what words to tag with, and what language(s) to tag in, but when not to tag. Tagging photos of friends on Facebook, for example, may be inappropriate at times, and it may be ethical to get their permission before doing so.
5. How do I get started with tagging?
You and your students could start adding digital photos with tags to Flickr. You could set up a class blog and tag each post depending on the topic. You and your students could start saving and tagging webpages in a social bookmarking tool such as Delicious (www.delicious.com) or Diigo (www.diigo.com). If you tag all of these online resources with a speciallychosen class tag, such as ‘eng101’ or ‘fce2012’, then you can easily retrieve them for a specific group of students. The students themselves can add and tag their own resources out of class, and these, too, will be easy to retrieve.
Nicky Hockly has been involved in EFL teaching and teacher training since 1987. She is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online teacher training and development consultancy. She is co-author of How to Teach English with Technology, Learning English as a Foreign Language for Dummies, Teaching Online and Digital Literacies. She has published an e-book, Webinars: A Cookbook for Educators (the-round.com), and she maintains a blog at www.emoderationskills.com.
This article first appeared in English Teaching professional, Issue 83, 2012.
