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...
| Published in: | Journal of Computer Assisted Learning Vol. 29; no. 3; pp. 235 - 248 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | research tables/charts Journal Article |
| Published: |
Wiley-Blackwell
Jun2013
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| Summary: | 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. |
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