Moving Along

I am so hopelessly behind in the tasks for the Multiliteracies EVO session, that I should be ashamed.  And I am.  Sort of.

But I was reading my feeds on Bloglines tonight and came across Michael Shade’s post about trying to catch up.  He had a link to the reading Folksonomies: Tidying Up Tags? by Guy and Tonkin.  I thought, “Wow!  That’s something I need to read!” so I did.  (I was a bit disheartened, though,  to discover it was a week 2 reading since we are almost through week 4 now!  Oh well…)

After reading, I immediately went to my delicious account to check out my tags.  I have always felt that I have too many.  But the reading made me think that most of my tags are OK.  At least almost all of them are used more than once.  The ones that aren’t are personal saves with tags that make sense to em. So I felt better about it than I had before reading the article.

But still, I am not happy with the way I tag.  Even here on the blog, I don’t always use the same mindset when I tag posts, so it isn’t as consistent as I would like.  Delicious is worse because it covers a much, much wider range of topics.  This evening I went through a few articles that I had saved to see if the tags still made sense to me, and they did.  But sometimes when I am going back through, looking for a particular article, I can’t find it as easily as I think I should be able to.  I would like to find a good way to remedy that.

When I started using delicious, I didn’t really understand tagging.  I think that is part of the problem.  When I started a delicious account to use with my students, I knew what I wanted to accomplish, and it was easier to set the tags up.  Also, the range of topics is still somewhat limited.  That helps. And yet, the tags I have used there, signifying the course and the semester the articles were used, would be the kind of tags that some people consider troublesome in that they would never make sense to anyone else.  But they really make sense to me.  And they will make it possible for me to track when I used the resources that I have used – which is a very big part of why I set up the account.  So am I wrong?  I don’t think so.

Guy and Tonkin say:

Still, possibly the real problem with folksonomies in not their chaotic tags but that they are trying to serve two masters at once; the personal collection, and the collective collection.

For me right now, the personal collection is what is important to me.  So I will continue to have the odd tag here and there .. and there and there and probably everywhere.