The microstructures of social tagging

Abstract

This article presents a rational model developed under the distributed cognition framework that explains how social tags influence knowledge acquisition and adaptation in exploratory ill-defined information tasks. The model provides integrated predictions on the interactions among link selections, use and creation of tags, and the formation of mental categories. The model shows that the quality of tags not only influences search efficiency, but also the quality of mental categories formed during exploratory search. In addition, the model shows that aggregate regularities can be explained by microstructures of behavior that emerged from the adaptive assimilation of concepts and categories of multiple users through the social tagging system. The model has important implications on how collaborative systems could influence higher-level cognitive activities.

Tracing knowledge co-evolution in a realistic course setting: A wiki-based field experiment

“…Similar arguments have been made by Fu (2008) who assumes that artifacts created in the use of social software can lead to changes in cognitive schemas.…”

Verbatim and Semantic Imitation in Indexing Resources on the Web: A Fuzzy‐trace Account of Social Tagging

“…This is why participants were required to perform the distractor task before the test phases. The reason for emphasizing secondary memory processes was that they have been found to play a major role in ST (e.g., Fu, 2008;Fu & Dong, 2012). In our future work, we will more specifically focus on the impact of primary memory as a trigger for searching secondary memory by cues from external environment (e.g., Unsworth & Engle, 2007).…”

The design of TaCS: applying social tagging to enhance learning

“…In an individual perspective, the need to organise information for later personal retrieval has been found as one of the most important motivation for tagging (Gao, 2011). In a social perspective, some recent work (Fu, 2008;Kimmerle et al, 2010) suggested that social tagging supports cognitive and social learning processes. Our research, described in details in section 2.3, is based upon these results.…”

“…Within the framework of Cognitive Distributed Systems (DCS), Fu (2008) studied the interactions between the internal and external representations of concepts, tags and documents when a user is engaged in iterative explore-and-comprehend cycles. Their results suggest that (1) the interactions between internal concepts and external tags gradually lead to the sharing and assimilation of conceptual structures and (2) social tagging systems are then a means for social exchange of knowledge structures.…”

“…However, little is known about how Web 2.0 technologies, particularly social tagging, may directly interact with individuals at the knowledge and cognitive level (Held & Cress, 2009). Some recent work (Fu, 2008;Kimmerle, Cress, & Held, 2010) showed how social tagging supports cognitive and social learning processes. Based on these results, we were interested in the use of tagging in education as a support for enhancing learning experience and fostering group dynamics in collaborative activities.…”