Tags and self-organisation: a metadata ecology for learning resources in a multilingual context

Social tags offer a novel aspect to study learning resources, its metadata and how users interact with them. The key theme in this research is to understand the central role of social tagging for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), more specifically, for digital learning resources in a multilingual context. The main hypothesis is that the self-organisation aspect of a social tagging system on a learning resource portal helps users discover learning resources more efficiently and that user-generated tags make the system, which operates in a multilingual context, more robust and flexible. First, the learning resource landscape is introduced, after which a short look on social tagging and self-organisation is offered. Finally, the structure of this thesis is presented with the main hypothesis.