There are other tools people could develop to help the community with this, however. One would be a sort of taxonomy import/export/sharing tool that lets you share classification schemes the way OPML lets you share RSS subscription lists. FXML (or “faceted XML”) would be a good candidate language for this sort of thing. (By the way, Drupal apparently already has an FXML export module.)

Another good idea would be a tool that lets you compare tags (or categories) to see how much they overlap. I recently posted about this idea.

Anyway, the main goal is to give people a way to share not just tags but domains of usage for the tags. Self-discovery works on this level as well as on the existing del.icio.us-style level.

Regarding Beth’s comments about Blackboard, SLN, del.icio.us and “shared references,” I think her instincts are correct: the LMSs don’t feel quite right. This is because they have not been designed with collaborative activity at their core. del.icio.us was created with public sharing at center stage. It’s not a question of “can it accomodate external references or shared links” – it’s more a question of “how do we use its native capabilites productively in an academic environment.” Even though we may ask our students to use the tag “class:ha112_105,” the resultant agglomeration of links feels more collaborative and less orchestrated because it is occurs outside of the behemoth of the “system.” At least it does to me. Now, the question really is, will our students fall for it? Afterall, it’s just another assignment.

However, suppose you have a tag that specifies that what you mean by “donatello” is the name of an artist and not the name of a cartoon character, e.g., “artist:donatello.” Now you get some of his obscure works, some portraits of him, articles about him, etc. In this case, the serendipity is interesting. On the other hand, if you actually were looking for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stuff, you could use the “cartoon:donatello” tag. By using the pair, identical tags (e.g., “donatello”) can be separated for different purposes (e.g., people bookmarking information about art and people bookmarking information about cartoons).

Naturally, it only works if people agree to use the same first half of the tag to specify the category, which requires some organization and consensus (as opposed to just using the straight “donatello” tag, which requires no coordination at all to get the serendipity thing to happen). But there are ways to deal with this.

In Eric’s method, you accumulate references found by the student that pertain to a specific course or even content area of a course. This is similar to the “External Links” section of a Bb course (but the students can’t contribute — Is there a group page that you could do this with in Bb I wonder?). It is also similar to the “Shared References” area of the SLN template (which can’t be divided into folders or content areas (as in Bb), but which students CAN contribute to).

So, how is this method (tagging with class: ha112) different or better? Something about it feels more interesting, but I can’t put my finger on what it is…

Tag prefixes such as “art:” could accomplish the same thing as ArtFlickr, with the added benefit that you could add an “ignore prefixes” check box on the tag search function, so if you really wanted to see everything that anybody tags with “France”, you still can.

To get an idea of how this might work, try browsing around Photo.net gallery and imagine adding folksonomy tags to it. (The Photo.net gallery could be considered a rough analog to ArtFlickr for photographers.)

I’m not sure I agree that a good collection of users would be art history students (in Flickr, for example). I like the idea of the cross-disciplinary and inside/outside academy connections that could be made. So, how would one create a useful community??

Anyway, too many art historians gives me the heebie-jeebies, always has.