Saturday, April 24, 2010

Playing TAG

Many staff and students are using web services for displaying, organising and sharing their work. A number of Creative Arts teachers have been looking at how work might be tagged within these services so that staff and students can search for products created

  • by Tasmanian Polytechnic students and staff
  • in the same course or qualification
  • on the same campus
  • using the same media

In addition to facilitating searching a state-wide tagging system could allow teachers to easily collate student work for quality assurance/moderation across the state.

One issue to be addressed is the fact that students and staff are currently using a range of different web services for the same function. For example photos are uploaded into Flickr, Picasa, Deviant Art... We can create a single RSS feed from multiple web services by using an RSS aggregator that creates a new combined RSS feed such as Yahoo Pipes - rather than mandate a single web service.


We would also like to showcase student work by tagging items so that they automatically appear in RSS feeds within embedded code set up for our intranet, Facebook and public website. This will be archived by creating a Flickr group (linked to a state-wide Creative Arts Flickr account) where students can display their best work. Some of this work will then be tagged for showcasing - as well as being organised into sets and galleries.

This cross-campus tagging can also be applied to web services for video, audio and other media - any services that provide an RSS feed from tag searches.

Some of the thinking behind the use of tagging is presented in the following slides created for Creative Arts staff considering using Flickr for the first time to encourage student comment and reflection. They would also like to use it to facilitate some mentoring and critique from the arts community outside the organisation.


1 comment:

Robin Petterd said...

Back in the good old days when I used to teach, we used "tasdesigners" as tag across difference social media sites. Some student have set up a tasdesigners facebook group