Sims Learning Connections

I am now circling back to Vignette #1 from my 25 February post to compare and contrast the LearningLinks approach to the alternative of using del.icio.us or another social bookmarking application.

• Both approaches allow for discovery of content beyond one’s own within a defined subject area.
• LearningLinks supports content ratings, which provides at least an indicator of potential value. del.icio.us displays the number of other people that have bookmarked the same page — another, although perhaps weaker, proxy for value.
• In social bookmarking I have full control, including creating my own groupings to build hierarchical structure (what del.iciou.us calls ‘bundles’.) In the LearningLinks approach I can influence the hierarchical structure by providing feedback, but I am unable to directly modify the structure to my own liking.

My somewhat obvious conclusions at this point:

• Hierarchical structures add value (again, I’m no fan of tag clouds or flat lists for navigation or browsing) and either example above can accomplish that
• Access to what others have thought as valuable (either discovery via common tags or more directly in LearningLinks) is useful and an improvement over plain search, although even internet search has an element of this with the “Google” algorithm using “number links to this” as a determining factor.
• Collaboration (which I define as shared work on a common work product, and therefore applicable to LearningLinks, but not to del.icio.us) also has the potential to increase value, but slows the creation and adoption
• Having full control of your own data both increases immediate personal value and speeds adoption

My discussion thus far then takes me to the latest made-up word in the tagging and taxonomy world, which seems to have just sneaked into the learning community this week: collabularies. Here I am with Stephen Downes who on Wednesday wrote:

I would not go so far as to use a word like ‘collabulary’ – that is a ridiculous word, and is not needed to describe something that we already have perfectly good words for, a ‘taxonomy’ or a ‘vocabulary’.

[19 October 2008 Update: removed a "side-bar rant" as contained an incorrect link]

Earlier in his post Stephen nicely makes the distinction of working independently and working collaboratively, even if collaboratively within social bookmarking. Back to the examples above, the del.ico.us ‘elearning’ tag is working independently and thus “folksonomy” as it tends to be defined and the LearningLinks example is closer to “collaborative vocabulary” although really more “collaborative directory.”

Sidebar comment: I notice that LearningLinks doesn’t have a top-level category for e-learning, but does have top categories for Mobile Learning and for Gaming & Simulation. Interesting choice. And, when I search on elearning I get 38 results, but have no way of telling where in the directory these are classified…thus, giving away value from the directory structure.

I’m reaching for something that is a further middle ground:

• What if LearningLinks was more wiki-like? Even if not allowing for direct rearrangement of the directory by all, at least providing a transparent (visible to all) back-channel as most wikis do with a ‘talk’ or ‘discuss’ page. This would allow for more explicit collaboration among all those interested in participating.
• What if del.icio.us supported easily creating and sharing a full-blown directory in a presentation form closer to LearningLinks? (perhaps they already do if I get at the API level of things?)
• What if LearningLinks also addressed vocabulary? For example, providing synonyms for the major directory listings.

Or, coming more “top-down” into either del.icio.us or LearningLinks with an existing authoritative taxonomy — if such exists in the learning area (note to self: dig into this more, the only thing even close to this that I am aware is the Learning Circuits glossary) — to guide the vocabulary and structure to more the ‘standard’. This thought then takes me to this Taxonomy directed folksonomies blog post from December, which a colleague at Novell passed along:

I’ve been exploring how to combine [taxonomy and folksonomy] into something I’ve named a taxonomy directed folksonomy (TDF). Basically we use a taxonomy (in this case ScOT) to suggest terms a user could in a tagging-type interface. I’s our hope that this interface will allow us to use the formally organized taxonomy at the back end to find related resources, while not intimidating users on the front end.

Closing rant: del.ico.us is unacceptably slow. On my shared wireless connection at the moment, a del.ico.us search on ‘elearning’ took an insanely long 30 seconds to return results. By comparison, Google and Yahoo search for ‘elearning’ both returned in sub-two seconds. This alone is about to drive me off of using del.ico.us, or at least look into alternatives. Worse, I can’t even get del.ico.us to return results on a search for ‘e-learning’, it must be getting tripped up by the hyphen? But, meanwhile, it does list ‘e-learning’ as a “related” term for elearning.