The use of social tagging to support the cataloguing of learning objects

Social networks have become the main media for information dissemination in the so-called Web 2.0. The core of these networks is social tagging, the act of annotating what users see in their social space. In the education domain, social tagging is potentially a useful resource to improve the organization (cataloguing) of large repositories of learning objects. To the present moment, however, many questions are open about social tagging in e-learning. In this work, hence, we proceed to answer three questions: (1) Can social tagging successfully catalog e-learning objects? (2) How do students behave according to Körner's classification: categorizers or describers? and (3) Does social tagging converge to a well-defined descriptive vocabulary of tags? We performed a large experiment with 336 technician students that marked 218 electronic learning objects for about 4,985 times. Our results show that social tagging is a promising practice for e-learning; however some issues must be addressed to prevent an excessive number of categorizer students and, also, a premature convergence of the vocabulary of tags. Our conclusions are specific for the setting of our experiment, but we generalize them as much as possible suggesting guidelines of how to use social tagging in e-learning.