I am increasingly interested in how we can use social bookmarks or tagging as a form of developing social networks based on content. We all know that social networking is a powerful tool for informal learning. But the friend of a friend type approach assumes a commonality of interest which does not always exist!

Tagging has the potential to generate similar social networks - based not on just friendship - however many steps renewed - but based on commonality of interest.

There are two contexts in which I am looking at tagging and at using delicio.us. The first is for research students. A friend of mine is researching sustatinable production. She is spending a considerable time undertaking a literature search, mainly through the internet and bookmarking sites on her computer. If she was to use delicio.us tags, not only would she develop a useful shared resource for all of us, but through following people who had used the sme tags, would speed up her work by finding what other work they had been following.

My second interest is as part of the background research for the MOSEP project. MOSEP is a European funded project researching and piloting e-Portfolios for vocational school students. For this project I have devised an initial list of tags which (I have suggested the seven or so partners in the project all use in their literature reviews and research activities. Hopefully, this will allow us to share our work in a distributed network. I will report back on how this goes.

My friend Mike Malloch has developed a very considerable resource of tags. He uses an interesting link blog to display this tags. he also has been working on developing different tools for displaying tags, including tag clouds and a tag viewer.

for another example of a useful tag collection, Colin Milligan from Cetis has assembled a collection of links to resources around Personal Learning Environments.

Technorati Tags: Peronal Learning Environments, tagging