Karen_Richardson_tutorial

The File Cabinet of the 21st Century: Tags
I grew up in a file cabinet world where things got classified in one way. Now, the Web is making us rethink how we categorize and classify and I believe being able to organize information is an essential 21st century skill.

Here's an overview of tags and their use with a social networking tool like Diigo:

media type="youtube" key="8vr8pCK725w" height="344" width="425" (NOTE: Watch this until the end...at one point you get a glimpse of the reason that schools don't like to use tools like this with their students!)

Tags are used everywhere on the web...from blogs to photo sharing sites. Learn more here:

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Using tags really isn't new...we've always taught kids how to use keywords to do searches and organize by categories. What's new is the possibility of overlap and the ability to combine ideas together. In addition, tags allow you to search your own and others' work. And they foster collaboration. In some groups, users collaborate to develop their own tags, creating what have become known as [|Folksonomies]. [|Social tagging] also allows organizations and events to use a particular tag that can then be searched across users. Twitter uses a particular kind of tag called a hashtag that allows users to search across Twitter posts.

As you can see, learning to use tags both to organize and search for information is essential. As students do research projects that include the web, they should be introduced to tools like Delicious or Diigo where they can store and share their resources. If they keep blogs as part of their writing, they should be shown how to choose two or three general keywords that categories their writing and then assign those tags.