Harnessing collective knowledge inherent in tag clouds.

Tagging systems represent the conceptual knowledge of a community. We experimentally tested whether people harness this collective knowledge when navigating through the Web. As a within-factor we manipulated people's prior knowledge (no knowledge vs. prior knowledge that was congruent/incongruent to...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Journal of Computer Assisted Learning Vol. 29; no. 3; pp. 235 - 248
Autores principales: Cress, U., Held, C.
Formato: research tables/charts Journal Article
Publicado: Wiley-Blackwell Jun2013
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:Tagging systems represent the conceptual knowledge of a community. We experimentally tested whether people harness this collective knowledge when navigating through the Web. As a within-factor we manipulated people's prior knowledge (no knowledge vs. prior knowledge that was congruent/incongruent to the collective knowledge inherent in the tags). As between-factor we manipulated whether people had tag clouds available or not. In line with the Information Foraging Theory and with the Co-Evolution Model of individual learning and collective knowledge building, we found that people's prior knowledge and tag clouds influenced their navigation. Tags which were congruent with people's prior knowledge had a higher probability of being selected. A knowledge test showed that participants adapted their individual conceptual knowledge to the collective knowledge. This incidental learning shows that people harness collective knowledge just by navigation with tag clouds.