Comparison of educational tagging systems – any chances of interplay?

Abstract

Web-based tagging systems for educational resources allow users to associate free keywords with resources to facilitate their retrieval and reuse. This paper looks at the similarities and differences among three such systems. We first focus on the purpose of tagging and the incentives for users to tag educational resources. Then, we compare the most used tags in each system. We find that even if the tagging system design decisions differ, there is a number of similarities in tags that are shared among more than one of the services. Secondly, we conduct a case-study on teachers use of different platforms to search for learning resources. Concluding on these two studies, our goal is to discuss the reuse of tags across systems and use them as a navigational aid for a user to cross system boundaries to better discover resources of interest.