Tags and You– LRND 5660 Reflective

August 26, 2010

It’s one thing to read about new technology and concepts, but it is another to apply it to what you need to accomplish. After reading the first three chapters of Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web by Gene Smith (2007), I, like many people, simply absorbed the information and then moved on to the next thing begging for my attention on my rapidly expanding To Do list.
Later that night, however, my wife mentioned that she was having trouble finding a good book to read. When asked about it, she said she didn’t know of one in particular that she wanted to read, but wanted one that was both autobiographical, inspirational, and of a famous person.
Right away I remembered http://www.librarything.com/, which allows its users to tag books with whatever they think best describes the tome. A simple search with some of the tags yielded hundreds of results, and domestic bliss and reading enjoyment were shortly restored.
If I pull away anything from this little experiment, it’s that Tagging really works. The old ways of looking for information seem quite outdated and one dimensional compared with what is available to us today. Instead of imagining the data as a filing cabinet, instead now we have a spiderweb, where each piece of data has the potential to be connected to another in ways not always readily recognizable. It’s like playing 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with data instead of people.
This metadata is quite powerful, and on a personal level it brings to mind what its capabilities are with photography. I could go through my archives and add tags to all of my photos, from mountain scenes to portraits, and make finding what I need in a fraction of the time. The old way is to search by date or maybe file name, a process which is both slow and tedious. Not only would it increase my workflow speed, but if I decided to sell stock photography or needed to instantly find some older photos for a client it would be child’s play.
So what’s the next big thing after Tagging in terms of categorizing data? Maybe someone will invent visual tags and it will turn our data into one large photo association game. Whatever happens, I know I’ll be interested in new ways to better organize my data.
Posted by acarpen
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Who I am, in brief

August 24, 2010

I am a beginning student in the Learning Design program here at BGSU and a teaching assistant at the college as well. A 2007 graduate of the VCT program, I worked as a photojournalist for the Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune newspaper (http://www.sent-trib.com) for close to 7 years total. Loved the job, but decided it was time to learn something new. While working there, I photographed everything from high school and college sports, spot news (ex: car accidents and fires), murder trials, portraits, you name it.

I’m becoming more interested in digital rights management and how new technology is leapfrogging the laws we currently have in place. I can be found on Facebook, linkedin, Skype (apcarpen), and twitter (apcarpen). I see this program as a great way to gain some insight about the brave new world of Learning 2.0 we are all rapidly becoming a part of. In my free time I love to make great food, ride my bike, take pictures, and rock climb.

I hope that we will all have the opportunity to learn and teach each other from our own disciplines.

Posted by acarpen
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