Tag Cloud for Engaged Learning by tagcrowd.com
Tom Stone left a comment on my last “Social vs. Not” picture and I wanted to share.
In a great many contexts, tagging is preferable. But not all of course. Sometimes by going with flat tagging you’ll lose valuable information — such as situations where the items/info/concepts being do in fact bear a hierarchical relationship to one another. This isn’t just for family trees or corporate structures either — there are plenty of things in the world that have conceptual parent/child relationships between them, and that is good info that a hierarchy system can convey nicely.
I know you didn’t say otherwise — you were just extolling the virtues of tagging here. But I just thought I’d toss this observation into the mix… as a plea for retaining hierarchy systems where it makes sense too. Plus… there is no reason you can’t have both… a hierarchy structure complete with breadcrumb trails (even multiple placement in the structure/trails, like with eBay categories) in addition to open, flat tagging by users too. Then you get best of both worlds!
True, I was ‘just extolling the virtues of tagging,’ but the point you make, Tom, is very important. As I have mentioned in the past, these new tools should ADD TO, not always replace what we have. They were there for a reason and the reason is probably still valid.
Email is not going away (darn it) and neither is PowerPoint because there are many useful purposes for them. But they may be used less.
When creating social structures, tagging is important, but so is hierarchy. Most people are used to finding information using hierarchies and not tagging. If you give them something completely new that they don’t know how to use without another option, they won’t use it. This is why I don’t let everything sit in one bucket.
Use a hierarchy in conjunction with tagging. Use the old with the new.
