information for their project. Next,
they do something with it. Within
their bucket, they create columns or
sections and label them:
• Source material
• URL/source
• Summary
• Rating
• Tags
Once students have gathered mate-
rial and have identified their sources,
they engage in information process-
ing. They’re not writing their papers
yet or answering big questions. In the
third column, we ask students to sum-
marize the source material. If students
are not used to doing summaries,
they’ll have to practice. The idea is to
carve away the unnecessary informa-
tion and get closer to the essence of
the content.
After students have summarized
the source material for each resource
they find, they assign a type of meta-data they are likely already familiar
with: a rating. Just like a video game
review they might see on a website,
students apply a 1–5 star rating for the
resource. They are rating the quality
of what they’ve summarized. Does it
make sense? Did it come from a likely
reputable source? Do the facts jibe
with other resources they’ve found?
After a rating is applied, we have
a teachable moment. If the students’
digital buckets are part of a read/write
framework (blogs, wikis, shared documents, or social bookmarking tools,
such as Diigo’s education edition),
they can ask other students to rate the
resource too. Then they can compare
ratings and discuss their reasoning
with each other.
Finally, students apply tags. Folk-
sonomy is a method for organizing the
overabundance of information online.
The ability for users to tag content is
now a ubiquitous feature of almost ev-
ery Web 2.0 site. Tagging applies your
own meaning and the context of the
information to the content. The star rat-
ings we see on Amazon for books, the
keywords used to identify photos on
Flickr, or the tags we might apply to a
blog post or to photos in Facebook are
all methods of practicing folksonomy.
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