Folksonomy

Basics
Folksonomy is a mash-up word (//portmanteau// word) which combines "folk" and "taxonomy." It refers to a an increasingly common scheme for classifying information on the web, especially in websites thought of as "web 2.0". Consider the old-school method for saving files, emails, or bookmarks. An individual user set up a hierarchy of folders, and each item to be saved had to be classified into one folder. Finding the item later meant having to recall your thinking when you categorized and stored it originally.

Folksonomy, by contrast, utilizes a keyword scheme called tagging. A user may generate any number of terms, or tags, which might describe the item under consideration. Order of the tags does not matter. Any of the tags, individually or in combination, may be used when later searching. Tags may be reused once created, but new tags can be generated at any time. Further, in (most forms of) folksonomy, the set of all possible tags is shared among users of the particular service. One user may choose to use tags which other users have already created when saving an item. A user may recall their own items - but may also use tags to discover what others have stored. Often, it is possible to see how many and which other users have saved a particular item, enabling a sense for which items have proven useful, as well as the serendipity which can occur when exploring a collection of someone else with similar interests.

Many websites generate "tag clouds" which indicate the relative importance/frequency of particular tags. More sophisticated tools visually display the relationship of tags to one another.

Some subtle distinctions exist with regard to folksonomies. Some tools such as http://gmail.com employ a "personal" folksonomy - i.e. each user supplies tags and deals with the tagged items individually. Other tools, such as http://flickr.com, a photo sharing site, employ social/collective tags, but most items are supplied and tagged by one or few people - this is a "narrow" folksonomy. That is, a person may upload a picture of their cat Fluffy and tag it "cat", enabling anyone searching for pictures tagged "cat" to see it - but other users generally wouldn't also tag the picture of Fluffy. By contrast, a "broad" folksonomy, as with http://del.icio.us, has users tagging the same items - in this case, URLs of websites which they want to remember. In this case, not only are tags useful for discovering more sites on the same topic which others have saved, but users may also view other tags which other users generated for a resource of interest to them - thus broadening their understanding of the topic beyond what otherwise might have happened. (For more on this, see [|here].)

See the [|Wikipedia folksonomy] article for more overview.

Teacher-oriented uses
One of the key uses of folksonomy is for research and managing of knowledge, particularly via "social bookmarking" or shared tagging of websites and web-based content. As Will Richardson says, "social bookmarking also challenges us to rethink the way we and our students treat the information we find. Traditionally, we emphasize keeping track of where our research comes from. In this new construct, it will become even more important to know how to retrieve it within the folksonomies created with our community of researchers" (see [|The Social Web] and Educause's [|7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking])

Teachers may agree upon a common tag to use in a website such as http://del.icio.us or http://www.flickr.com in order to create a common pool of resources to share amongst themselves.

Student-oriented uses
The student-oriented uses of folksonomy are very similar to the teacher-oriented uses, and are oriented around the collective discovery, sharing, and managing of knowledge.

Resources to learn more
See Jim's [|del.icio.us resources tagged with 'folksonomy'] to learn more, as well as to see the concept in action.

[|More about del.icio.us] See Wired's [|Folksonomies Tap People Power] for more on the concept and links to example websites.

Resources/examples of this technology in education
eSchoolNews article: [|For Some Educators, Tagging is It] (free registration may be required) discusses tools and tagging in school contexts.

Research on this technology in education
Here's a 2006 paper by a Harvard grad student entitled [|Social Tagging in K-12 Education: Folksonomies for Student Folk]. This article reviews (at a very high level) the literature on folksonomies in the context of K12 education - and there is little education-specific research to cite. The author offers some interesting suggestions about current and future uses for folksonomies in K12 education.