Social tagging systems allow users to upload and assign keywords to digital resources. Thus a body of user annotated resources gradually evolves: Users can share resources, re-find their own resources or use the systems as search engines for items added by the whole user population. In this paper we want to contribute towards a better understanding of usage patterns within social tagging systems by presenting results from a survey of 142 users of the systems. Flickr, Youtube, Delicious and Connotea. Data was gathered partly by using the Mechanical Turk service, and partly via an announcement on the Connotea blog. Our study reveals differences of user motivation and tag usage between systems. While (resource) sharing emerges as an all-embracing intra-system motivation, users differ with respect to social spheres of sharing. Based on our results which we integrated with earlier research from Cool and Belkin (2002), we propose a model of information behaviour in social tagging systems.

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Many current (online) help systems fail because users refuse to use them or, even if they do so, they do not perceive them as helpful. There is an obvious gap between the intentions of the help content authors and the achievement of objectives concerning the perceived usefulness by help users. Problems may be divided into psychological and implementation issues. On the psychological side users are often seriously challenged with understanding the instructions given by the system, which usually is not adequately adapted to user's prior knowledge or the vocabulary of a lay person. This problem of expert-lay communication is strengthened by the implementation problem of missing feedback channels. As a result, help systems do often leave users in isolation with their problems. The current article aims to address these issues by presenting an information architecture for an online help system which addresses aspects of communication between authors and users. The approach combines earlier models of design patterns with features for user contribution from social software and design principles in multimedia learning.

This paper describes a case study of assessing student's coding behavior and skills in a realistic development setting. Students had to solve typical programming problems in the context of app development for the Android platform using the Eclipse IDE. Data was analyzed using IDE as well as browser interaction logs. In addition, screen recordings of the students' interaction with the IDE provide further insight. In this paper we present the first results of our ongoing work.