I noticed something interesting while getting Aperture up and running last night. While I was setting up all my tags, I realized that I now all of the sudden had an increased motivation to take a wider array of pictures. Why? Before, using iPhoto and it’s rather cloistered tagging system, I really only put tags on images that I knew I wanted to find, there wasn’t an easy way for me to get the tagging into my photo workflow. But with Aperture, the Keyword HUD allows me to have that tagging stage present at all times, it also helps that I can now search on a mix of keywords and tags (I’m sure I could have done all this in iPhoto, but it’s not as transparent). So while iPhoto does the storage and distribution part of digital photography very well, it’s ease of use is almost a barrier to getting any deeper (perhaps this is a reflection of it’s limited editing toolset). But how does this relate to what I’m thinking about for this post? Well this post was originally going to be about photography, but then listening to the recorded sessions from the Connectivism Conference (George Siemens), it got me thinking…
Almost all social networking systems use the tag – folksonomy is a meme that seems to have evaporated for a while from the web – but I don’t think enough has been said (or maybe I haven’t looked and now I’m seeing it for myself) about how powerful it is when it comes to learning and reflection. Tagging is seemingly also the gateway to the entire “connectivism” model of learning. Tagging, if you want to think of it another way is the mental hyperlinking that we can use to group and classify data.
This is nothing new, Dewey did it with his decimal system. What seems to have happened is that as we went digital, we forgot about the need to classify the information. In my mind, it seems that for a short time, as the ‘net was growing, it was possible to contain everything that you needed or wanted to know about in your own head space. After that, and where we are now, the amount of information started to explode and search started to rise, but what we are finding now is that with all the information out there now, there is no way a generic search can be of any use to someone looking for a specific topic. So using tags and connections between like minded people, we’ll be better able to access and reflect on the information that is out there. This is supposed to be Web3.0, the semantic web.
What I have some level of fear about when it comes to this, is the EPIC 2014 problem, if we rely on connections that are self generated, we will seal ourselves into an echo chamber and I think everything that we think we’ll have gained will be lost as we essentially start to reflect on nothing that can contribute to anything else. So what can we do to disrupt this condition and nurture connections that would not have otherwise been made? I don’t know… but I think one way to be warned that we are starting to commit some manner of “connect-cest” is noticing when ideas start to become more thought experiments and are inspired by “virtual” connections.
A bit of a brain dump there…
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