Research on Tagging

I enjoyed reading this week's papers on tagging. Basically, the central purpose of tagging is indexing information.

Regarding cognition for instruction, tagging requires learners to use their high level of cognitive skills or meta-cognition. To add appropriate tags to something, they need to think of a whole picture of the contents. This is inherently related to reflection, evaluation, and meta-cognition, which explains why researchers pay attention to these tagging activities on instruction.

In online communities, tagging is appeared to have two major roles: indexing knowledge (making contents searchable) and shaping communities' identity (by forcing users' contents to be included in one of the categories they have). Of course, these two major roles are closely related.

As Dr. Dennen mentioned, it might be interesting to explore how the landscapes of online spaces are shaped differently by the tags they established. 

Given that Twitter is an account-oriented online environment, Reddit might be a better place to be researched since it is a more community-based online space.