Harnessing Web 2.0 for Context‐Aware Learning: The Impact of Social Tagging System on Knowledge Adaption

We present an empirical study investigating how interactions with a popular social tagging system, called del.icio.us, may directly impact knowledge adaptation through the processes of concept assimilation and accommodation. We observed 4 undergraduate students over a period of 8 weeks and found that the quality of social tags and distributions of information content directly impact the formation and enrichment of concept schemas. A formal model based on a distributed cognition framework provides a good fit to the students learning data, showing how learning occurs through the adaptive assimilation of concepts and categories of multiple users through the social tagging system. The results and the model have important implications on how Web 2.0 technologies can promote formal and informal learning through collaborative methods. INTRODUCTION The World Wide Web (WWW) gained extreme popularity during the late 1990s due to its simple architecture and design (Millard & Ross, 2006). The 1990s version of the WWW, now dubbed as Web 1.0 (O’Reilly, 2005), is characterized as “read-only” Web. Web 1.0 efforts included content management systems, fixed directory structures and portals that used client-server architecture. In stark contrast, Web 2.0 is characterized by user-generated content (e.g., blogs, photos), communities of users (e.g., social networks), peer to peer networks (e.g., Napster), and content syndication (O’Reilly, 2005). While the exact definitions of Web 2.0 is open to debate, it is important to note that web applications have evolved into collaborative user-centered rich internet applications (RIA). The implication of this evolution is significant considering its possible impact in a variety of domains ranging from healthcare (Kaldoudi et al., 2008), marketing (Parise & Guinan, 2008), e-Science (Fox et al., 2007) and education (Ullrich et al., 2008). DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-826-0.ch007