Post #1: Folksonomy and Creating Community at School...

In 2004, Thomas VanderWal, an informational architect and Internet developer, coined the terms infocloud and folksonomy to describe how information was created and shared over such an enormous scale--like the Internet. In his own words, folksonomy "is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others). Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information."

The value in this external tagging is derived from people using their own vocabulary and adding explicit meaning, which may come from inferred understanding of the information/object. People are not so much categorizing, as providing a means to connect items (placing hooks) to provide their meaning in their own understanding. Vander Wal envisioned folksonomy ("tagging that works") as having three tenets: 1) tag; 2) object being tagged; and 3) identity, are core to disambiguation of tag terms and provide for a rich understanding of the object being tagged (Vander Wal, 2007). When people tag that data, they aren't just creating more data--they're creating metadata (Dye, 2006). I think that they are creating communities. What better way for a school to create community and connection by sharing--photosharing?


So, how does Vander Wal, folksonomy, and tagging all fit into the need for schools to create community? To this end, what would be best practice for photosharing services like Flickr? How does my multi-faceted role fit into this whole scheme? In terms of my own personal life and learning how much to a contribute to the collective tagging efforts?

In my life? As a part of my life?

Admittedly, I am not a picture taker. I really never was. And it probably wasn't until came around that we (my wife Cate and I) recognized 1) the need to document; and 2) a need to store and manage the documentations. Since 2003, we have used Shutterfly to store and manage our photographs. Personally, I love the fact that my parents, who still prefer "the paper version" (mom's words) of photographs over the "digital holograms" (again her words), have the option to create print version our any of the photos. Shutterfly also offers its community members a feature to that allows any of their photographs to be professionally prepared and delivered right to your door (although we have never exercised this option). We have made cards and invitations with the store images as well we have created and share photobooks with family and friends.

On the job training, sir!

I struggled to figure out a way that, as a non-enrolling teacher-librarian, I could best utilize photosharing services practices. I reviewed my various roles at the school: school website and library website administrator, Moodle administrator, computer helping teacher. My roles and responsibilities at the school are so entwined and enmeshed with technology and school promotion and documentation I feel that Flickr or any other photosharing


Among the teacher-librarian hat I also am the school website and school Moodle administrators. I am also the guy that you call My roles and responsibilities at the school are so entwined and enmeshed with technology and school promotion and documentation I feel that Flickr will offer me the chance to take it to the next level.


Last year, in order to document school-related curricular and co-curricular events I shot well over 600 photos. As like most people we use whatever it is that we're most comfortable with to help us complete a task. Although a nail gun may be more of a time saver I'm not framing my newly designed shed with a tool with which I am unfamiliar. But a hammer. And while it may not have been the best selection at the time, it was a tool with which I was comfortable with and gave the feeling of control.


In previous years, I have used Slideshare to create slide shows with picture from school-related event--there's probably over forty in all--an effective method for school promotion and documentation. With cross-promotion on the school website, our school Slideshare account has received many views. In fact, one slide show was one of the most popular talked about on Facebook for three days  (don't ask, it' s a long and convoluted story). 

As advantageous as This process involved several steps and a commitment of time: take photos, upload them to computer, create a PowerPoint presentation, upload the presentation to Slideshare which converted the PowerPoint to its own language. And while you could tag the presentations individual photos and images could not be searched individually.


Fast forward a year later armed with a Flickr account and community members ready to get involved, we have undergone a collective folksonomy on a school level. Teachers, coaches, students, and other school-related groups are on board and we've begun our own "informal social classification". Collaboration through collective tagging gives members of these communities a chance to build their own search systems from the ground up, based on their own vocabularies, interests, and ideas. (Dye, 2006) This is what I envision with our school community Flickr account.


IN terms of learning and teaching, there is no question that once teachers become proficient at utilizing Flickr, the potential exists to adopt the tool for classroom use: documenting field trips, demonstrations, and experiments, and even specific lessons. Ulitmately, when students begin to see value in Flickr for classroom presentation the power of the tool really becomes evident. With any no Web 2.0 comes the communality, and sharing of images and ideas intra-departmentally and inter-departmentally. eaching teachers to upload and tag and share with the community as a whole; early in the experiment but it is promising; two teachers have shot images and are eager to upload; still others citing lack of time or trepidation have asked me to do it (someday I WILL teach them to upload, tag, and annotate their images)
--time to collaborate and let other members of community take role in creating and added to our record of events

--not only that if posters of pics open your photos and tags to others, as many Flickr devotees do, other people can examine and label your photos. Surely the cumulative force of all the individual tags can produces a bottom-up, self-organizing system for classifying mountains of digital material related and relevant to the school community I love that this sort of grass-roots categorization, by its very nature, is idiosyncratic rather than systematic. That sacrifices taxonomic perfection but lowers the barrier to entry and scrifices taxonomic per. Nobody needs a degree in library science to participate. 

Works Cited:

Dye, J. Apr2006, Vol. 29 Issue 3, p38-43, 6p Econtent retreived from EBSCOHOST September 25, 2010


Vander Wal, T. vander wal.net November 2007 Retrieved September 24, 2010