Of course we share! Testing Assumptions about Social Tagging Systems

Social tagging systems have established themselves as an important part in today's web and have attracted the interest from our research community in a variety of investigations. The overall vision of our community is that simply through interactions with the system, i.e., through tagging and sharing of resources, users would contribute to building useful semantic structures as well as resource indexes using uncontrolled vocabulary not only due to the easy-to-use mechanics. Henceforth, a variety of assumptions about social tagging systems have emerged, yet testing them has been difficult due to the absence of suitable data. In this work we thoroughly investigate three available assumptions - e.g., is a tagging system really social? - by examining live log data gathered from the real-world public social tagging system BibSonomy. Our empirical results indicate that while some of these assumptions hold to a certain extent, other assumptions need to be reflected and viewed in a very critical light. Our observations have implications for the design of future search and other algorithms to better reflect the actual user behavior

Collaboration between Librarians and Learning Technologists to enhance the learning of health sciences students.

Collaboration between Librarians and Learning Technologists at Bournemouth University (BU) has been stimulated and cemented by Pathfinder funding from the Higher Education Academy. This paper will consider four case studies collected as part of the eRes Project that describe the use of Web 2.0 technologies in the School of Health and Social Care at BU. The project aimed to enhance the student learning experience in an increasingly electronic environment. This was achieved by developing and disseminating innovative pedagogical frameworks, bringing together learning activities and academically led quality e-resources within the unit of study. An e-reading strategy which encompasses models for resource discovery and e-literacy was developed, drawing on the experiences and findings of the case studies. Issues considered in this paper will include accessing academic electronic reading materials and using a social bookmarking tool integrated within BU’s virtual learning environment with students studying away from the main campus. Additionally the paper will consider how technology can be used to motivate students, especially in large groups and how it can be used to engage students with a subject perceived as “dry” or “difficult”. The rich possibilities of health science materials can be exploited more fully using new technologies embedded within the curriculum

Using online primary sources to foster historical thinking

This paper describes an ongoing initiative to enhance learner digital literacies by fostering historical thinking using digitized primary sources. Engaging with primary sources is central to the development of authentic critical historical thinking. In the past thirty years, millions of primary sources have been digitized by libraries and archives and has created a wealth of rich content for historians and history students. However the sheer scale of sources material, websites and questions about source quality make it a challenging research environment for learners. Based on current tutor and student feedback, additional support material that could increase access to these valuable open educational resources would be well received. The initiative is creating a set of learning materials which will support the use of online primary sources and enhance the learner experience. These learning materials will support flexible/off-campus learners and their development of research skills in the six BA in Humanities (Open Education) history modules. The learning materials are comprised of: An interactive guide to online primary sources An accompanying social bookmarking web page- Diigo An online tutorial to practise finding, evaluating and using online primary source

Improving Placeholders in Digital Documents

Placeholders in physical documents provide critical support for the human reader in relocating material and their place in the text. However, the equivalent tools in digital documents have long been identified as suffering from unintuitive interactions and low rates of use. This paper evaluates the current bookmarking technologies found in digital document readers, and identifies a number of specific and significant shortcomings in their support for user activity. We introduce some simple interactions that close the gap between user requirements and the placeholder support in a simple document reader program. Through this, we demonstrate that improved interactions can be created that reduce the barriers that inhibit placeholder use in digital documents

ABSTRACTS OF POSTERS

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Ecology of social search for learning resources

Vuorikari, R., & Koper, R. (2009). Ecology of social search for learning resources. Campus-Wide Information Systems, 26(4), 272-286.Purpose: This paper deals with user-generated Interest indicators (ratings, bookmarks and tags). We answer two research questions: can search strategies based on Social Information Retrieval (SIR) make the discovery of learning resources more efficient for users, and can Community search help users discover a wider variety of cross-boundary resources. By cross-boundary we mean that the user and resource come from different countries and that the language of the resource is different from that of the user’s mother tongue. Design: We focus on a portal that access a federation of multilingual learning resource repositories. We collect users’ attentional metadata based on a server-side logging scheme and use this empirical data to answer two hypotheses. Findings: The search-play-annotation ratio is more efficient with Social Information Retrieval strategies, but Community browsing alone does not help users to discover more cross-boundary resources. Practical implications: By social tagging and bookmarking resources from a variety of repositories, users create underlying connections between resources that otherwise do not cross-reference, for example, via hyperlinks. This is important for bringing them under the umbrella of SIR methods. Future studies should include testing wider range of SIR methods to leverage these user-made connections between resources that originate from a number of countries and are in a variety of languages. Originality: The use of attentional metadata to model the ecology of social search adds value to the actors of learning object economy, e.g. educational institutions, digital libraries and their managers, content providers, policy makers, educators and learners

Soft peer review: social software and distributed scientific evaluation

The debate on the prospects of peer-review in the Internet age and the increasing criticism leveled against the dominant role of impact factor indicators are calling for new measurable criteria to assess scientific quality. Usage-based metrics offer a new avenue to scientific quality assessment but face the same risks as first generation search engines that used unreliable metrics (such as raw traffic data) to estimate content quality. In this article I analyze the contribution that social bookmarking systems can provide to the problem of usage-based metrics for scientific evaluation. I suggest that collaboratively aggregated metadata may help fill the gap between traditional citation-based criteria and raw usage factors. I submit that bottom-up, distributed evaluation models such as those afforded by social bookmarking will challenge more traditional quality assessment models in terms of coverage, efficiency and scalability. Services aggregating user-related quality indicators for online scientific content will come to occupy a key function in the scholarly communication system

Developing key concepts for the design of hypertext for printed books

In the modern world, computers and interactivity are becoming an ever-increasing phenomenon, but this means that the tactile appeal of the printed book is giving way to the increasing popularity of digital interactivity. This research explores how one of the integral concepts of computer interaction, hypertext, can be applied to the medium of print and the advantages that this can bring to the reading environment. The interaction used to read a printed book is different to that of reading material in an electronic form. Books are linear, moving forward, whereas electronic material is laterally associative. However, reading material in an electronic form, such as hypertext, allows the readers to customise and reorder knowledge for their own needs. In comparison, navigation of paper documents is aided by the information being fixed, and readers can easily refer to several documents simultaneously. The considerations that need to be made when combining the benefits of two such contrasting media needs careful attention. Six key design concepts applying hypertext methods to books are discussed to assist the production of effective reading media