Folksonomy May 27, 2008
Posted by estrella in Uncategorized.2 comments
In the previous post I presented the use of folksonomy for tagging the DiTV programs, so that they could be automatically and semantically matched to a course ontology. However, it wasn’t very clear what it is and why it is useful, so today I’ll give a brief explanation on the subject.
A folksonomy consists of a series of pieces of information of any kind classified by users with labels. The labels space is plain – without hierarchy, in contrast with an ontology or taxonomy – and common among all the users. So, the term would explain this “classification made by people”, as marked by Quintarelli, though the term is attributed to Van der Wal and made popular by Gene Smith. Van der Wal defines it like this:
Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one’s own retrival. 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.
So, this proccess has two dimensions or steps – personal and social. First, the user marks a piece of information to have an easier access to it later. This kind of selfish behaviour would be the personomy. Then, and more interesting for the rest of the world, it also contributes to a wider classification of articles – the folksonomy.
It’s worth noting that there are two kinds of indexation made by humans – the tagging done by the creator and the one done by the community of viewers. Examples of the first are YouTube (videos), Flickr (pictures), or Tagzania (places). Examples of the second, which would be the more accurate folksonomy, are mainly bookmarking sites as del.icio.us or ma.gnolia. Now we are interested in the second type.
What do we achieve by doing this? It is clear that ambiguation and synonims may give some problems. Selfish tags like “important” or “mine”, that only helps a user to find their marked items, don’t give any benefit to the community. However, the greatest amount are describing tags that give an average view of what we can find in that item.
Who said that ‘Heroes’ had anything to do with cheerleading? May 26, 2008
Posted by estrella in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
In the previous post, I was talking about the need of ontologies to define the area of interest of the course, so that we could afterwards match it with the metainformation attached to TV programs. So, here we come to the conclusion that TV programs should be semantically annotated, too.
But who performs such annotation?
It would be nice that the same people designing the course also annotated the programs. This, though, is impractical and maybe impossible, and the original idea is to achieve the matching automatically, so that new programs can be added to the course without new revision.
The simplest way would consist in letting the TV channels include this information by themselves. But here we face a potential problem: TV providers might not worry about t-learning, spending little time and effort in doing this correctly – we could find wrong tags, scarce or even no information at all, worse than using syntactical search.
The approach that Rey et al. propose is the use of social tagging, and it is, in fact, the main contribution of the article of discussion for this blog. Being the actual viewers the ones that assign tags to the programs, the most popular tags for a specific one should be highly accurate.
In the next posts we’ll have a look on social tagging, which is called folksonomy, and how it can be applied to t-learning in practice.
What should I watch to learn about first aids? … ‘Blossom’? ‘ER’? May 24, 2008
Posted by estrella in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
So, you sit in front of the television, switch it on and… what happens? Are you automatically learning? If it is so, what are you learning??
And, if you are interested in a specific topic, what should you watch?
Also thinking about the technical side, how could you relate TV programs with related more “formal” educative content and make a link between them?
It is clear that something is needed in order to solve all these problems. And it seems that the best approach is the use of ontologies.
Why? First of all, using an ontology improves the creation of a relationship between related contents, since syntactic analysis is not so efficient as a semantic one. Second, hierarchycal ontologies may provide more related information like the supersubject, a case application or subsubject, or sibling topics that might be of interest, too.
When designing a t-learning course, then, the first step should be defining an ontology. It could be then compared with metadata attached to TV programs, and in this way:
- create a set of programs of interest for the learner, and
- deliver highly related interactive or support content with them.
A plus for the use of ontologies would be the possibility to interconnect them. The learner could then find other courses that may be somehow connected to the current one, letting him or her explore new fields and learn new things, just by following the thread!
3, 2, 1… Restarting… May 20, 2008
Posted by estrella in Uncategorized.add a comment
Lately my blog was in forced vacation, now it’s back! (though comments have sadly disappeared).
Please keep tuned in to know more about t-learning and Rey’s approach on the subject.
The steps so far… (ii) May 9, 2008
Posted by estrella in Uncategorized.add a comment
Continuing with the state of the art of the previous post, I will present some ideas about learning in the home.
The home is clearly one of the preferred places for learning, along with schools and workplaces. As I highlighted in the previous post, this is a favourite mean for people who would like to learn something new, but they are not able because of lack of time (e.g. they work) or accessibility (like handicaped people). Also, the high flexibility and adaptability it presents is a good point for even those who are not constraint by the above factors.
In the case of children, the learning process at home is a key factor for their education as a whole. However, they tend to find ‘boring’ anything that has to do with education and their homework.
Information and communication technologies (ICT) makes it possible to change from demand driven to supply-led learning. But the most important part is the ability to stimulate motivation. Does television meet this requirement? Well, it depends highly in the way that information is provided, and there is still a lot to be researched in this sense.
Anyway, there are studies that focuses on the impact TV has on viewers. Most of them study the way advertisement modifies behaviours and attitudes. Some have also noted that television may help develop cognitive skills as spatial abilities, visual skills or image storehouse. It has also been noted that, from the user’s point of view, understanding TV content is easier than understanding print content.
What is sure is that interactivity plays a major part in the success of learning, as it leads to more attention, practise development and personal discovery. It is important to remark that it is not a matter of replicating human-human communication of ideas, but device-human interaction. The discussion about the types of interaction that may be needed for each topic is long, and must be taken into account when developing a learning object.
Interactivity, then, can be the key to reach people and stimulate them into learning in its multiple forms through DiTV.
