Social Bookmarking / Social Tagging Platform Into the Context of the German Education Server (Edutags)

Project description

Teachers would be able to administrate bookmarks relating to didactic materials online, and to organise these bookmarks and make them available to other members of their “community“.

The German Education Server (Eduserver) offers an edited collection of information resources covering all areas of education. While editing the thematic areas assures the high quality of selected resources

on the one hand, a continual increase in information resources means that the editors can only index a limited part of the existing relevant material, and integrate it into the portal. 

At the same time, teachers are nowadays faced with the task of searching the internet for teaching resources, and managing a growing quantity of accessible material. Their work is supported if they can archive resources they have retrieved themselves, and moreover benefit from the resources their colleagues have found, and integrate their own material into an interactive form of expert discourse. Such an exchange among colleagues shall be supported by an interactive online service using the potentials of the internet and of social software.

The project "Testing and Integrating a Social Bookmarking / Social Tagging Platform into the Context of the German Education Server: Setup of a Prototypical Resource Pool for STEM Subjects" (Edutags) would create an opportunity for developing a tool that enables teachers

• to manage and organise their bookmarks online;
• to share these bookmarks with other user groups and/or make them available to the entire community of users;
• to submit their own contents to the system by means of standardised formats (e.g. RSS newsfeeds);
• to submit their own contents to the system by managing their personalised workspace.

Interfaces will allow for integrating the tool into school websites, services offered by local educational providers and state education servers. Lists of results will be displayed in a variety of formats, and it will be possible to integrate these lists into external learning platforms.

A reserved space on the German Education Server will focus on results that have been made openly accessible by the users, sorted by the tags the users suggest. A prototypical Web 2.0 application will thus be developed in terms of a folksonomy created by expert users. The system will recommend tags to support the users in the process of tagging, based on the pool of tags that have already been assigned and on a taxonomy of related terms provided by the system. Following an editorial assessment of newly suggested resources, these can be integrated into the editorial space of the German Education Server. The combination of folksonomy and taxonomy will not only serve the integration of user-based data into the Education Server, but vice versa facilitate the mirroring of Eduserver resources (and others, such as ELIXIER resources) by the newly developed space.

Throughout the project’s duration, the tool has been tested in several schools. It is to be refined in a follow-up project.

Co-operations

University of Duisburg-Essen, Fakultät für Bildungswissenschaften, Lehrstuhl für Mediendidaktik und Wissensmanagement (Professor Dr. Michael Kerres)

Further Information

www.edutags.de

Project Team

Project Details