Tagging and Student Learning

Sometimes this class makes me wish I were still in the classroom, because I loved reading the article on Effective Tagging Practices (Dennen, V. P., Bagdy, L. M., & Cates, M. L. (2018). This line, toward the beginning of the article really stood out to me: 

Tagging serves both individual and collective pedagogical purposes. Individually, tagging activities promote self-regulation within the learning process (Cao, Kovachev, Klamma, Jarke, & Lau, 2015), whereas collaborative tagging activities are useful in classrooms because they promote peer engagement around content artifacts, and the act of tagging requires reflection (Bateman, Brooks, Mccalla, & Brusilovsky, 2007).

I would also say that not only does tagging promote reflection, but it also requires synthesis of information, and in the ELA classroom, could be an awesome way to help students summarize their understanding as well as meaningful interact with the content in ways that make sense to them. I can definitely understand how students would need to be purposefully taught to use social tagging, and in the beginning, like the article notes, the process would need to be super scaffolded, probably with the teacher deciding ahead of time what range of tags can be used, and then having the students practice with them. Especially since this article tapped an undergraduate population as opposed to middle or high school students. I also think that tags that are incorrect are a great indicator of student understanding, and could be an easy way for a teacher to identify who is struggling with the content. If any current teachers read this, would you be interested in trying tagging with your students? I feel like it could be so, so successful!


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