Ensuring the discoverability of digital images for social work education : an online tagging survey to test controlled vocabularies

The digital age has transformed access to all kinds of educational content not only in text-based format but also digital images and other media. As learning technologists and librarians begin to organise these new media into digital collections for educational purposes, older problems associated with cataloguing and classifying non-text media have re-emerged. At the heart of this issue is the problem of describing complex and highly subjective images in a reliable and consistent manner. This paper reports on the findings of research designed to test the suitability of two controlled vocabularies to index and thereby improve the discoverability of images stored in the Learning Exchange, a repository for social work education and research. An online survey asked respondents to "tag", a series of images and responses were mapped against the two controlled vocabularies. Findings showed that a large proportion of user generated tags could be mapped to the controlled vocabulary terms (or their equivalents). The implications of these findings for indexing and discovering content are discussed in the context of a wider review of the literature on "folksonomies" (or user tagging) versus taxonomies and controlled vocabularies

A lightweight web video model with content and context descriptions for integration with linked data

The rapid increase of video data on the Web has warranted an urgent need for effective representation, management and retrieval of web videos. Recently, many studies have been carried out for ontological representation of videos, either using domain dependent or generic schemas such as MPEG-7, MPEG-4, and COMM. In spite of their extensive coverage and sound theoretical grounding, they are yet to be widely used by users. Two main possible reasons are the complexities involved and a lack of tool support. We propose a lightweight video content model for content-context description and integration. The uniqueness of the model is that it tries to model the emerging social context to describe and interpret the video. Our approach is grounded on exploiting easily extractable evolving contextual metadata and on the availability of existing data on the Web. This enables representational homogeneity and a firm basis for information integration among semantically-enabled data sources. The model uses many existing schemas to describe various ontology classes and shows the scope of interlinking with the Linked Data cloud

Web 2.0, new literacies, and the idea of learning through participation

In this paper I identify some current elaborations on the theme of participation and digital literacy in order to open further debate on the relationship between interaction, collaboration, and learning in online environments. Motivated by an interest in using new technologies in the context of formal learning (Merchant, 2009), I draw on in-school and out-of-school work in Web 2.0 spaces. This work is inflected by the new literacies approach (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006a), and here I provide an overview of the ways in which learning through participation is characterised by those adopting this and other related perspectives. I include a critical examination of the idea of ‘participatory’ culture as articulated in the field of media studies, focusing particularly on the influential work of Jenkins (2006a; 2006b). In order to draw these threads together around conceptualizations of learning, I summarise ways in which participation is described in the literature on socially-situated cognition. This is used to generate some tentative suggestions about how learning and literacy in Web 2.0 spaces might be envisioned and how ideas about participation might inform curriculum planning and design