Title: The tagblog: exploring social web user contribution to encourage students to actively engage in learning content

Authors: Markus Heckner, Silke Schworm

Addresses: Media Educational Science, University of Regensburg, Germany. ' Media Educational Science, University of Regensburg, Germany

Abstract: After leaving the lecture hall, students hardly reflect about the lesson|s contents. To foster learning, the lesson content should be reorganised, elaborated and critically reflected. Tagging and blogging offer the opportunity to actively engage students in follow-up course work. This paper presents the results of a case study exploring the use of a social web application to encourage student contributions within the context of an undergraduate university seminar. The tagblog combines blogging, tagging and rating as three forms of online user contribution on Web 2.0 to develop a shared, emergent group knowledge repository. Blog posts, tags and comments are analysed to examine how user contributions reflect the active processing of learning content.

Keywords: Web 2.0; social web; higher education; contribution; learning content; student participation; universities; tagging; tags; blogging; blogs; weblogs; rating; undergraduate seminars.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2009.028088

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2009 Vol.5 No.4, pp.528 - 542

Published online: 04 Sep 2009 *

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