Carol Shergold ::   Blog | Network | | Aggregator | Profile | Page

Delicious research .. and potential reflection design pattern?

I've just registered to participate in a study called rescope that is looking at what individuals can learn about themselves and their thinking processes by reflecting on their delicious tag clouds.

Once you've signed up and given your delicious username, you are able to view a rescope visualisation page. This presents a standard view of your tags as a tag cloud with frequency of use represented through font size.

However, rescope have added in a further dimension, which is that tags for the last 20 sites you bookmarked are analysed, and the tags in your cloud are colour coded to show whether you have used them in your last 20 saves, and if so with what frequency.

There's a little micro-blogging style window that lets you save a 140 character reflection, and a neat feature that takes a snapshot of your tags at the point at which you save this reflection, so you can go back and review it later.

The experimenters are encouraging the use of # tags, again Twitter-style, for creating in-line tags.




Key to tag colour coding

screen shots from http://lnx-otecexp-005v.ou.nl/rescope/

How am I going to use rescope? I'm not really sure yet. I have definitely found it interesting to reflect on my use of tag clouds. See for example my posts Detail and the long tail and Presentation of self on the web (part 2). But I haven't ever managed to do it in 140 characters!

And I really like the way the rescope tag cloud shows data simultaneously in 2 dimensions - where size represents lifetime frequency of use and colour represents recent frequency of use.

But I'm not sure just seeing a slice of the last 20 sets of tags is enough to get me thinking.

However, if I look at the tags that are not in grey, which are the tags I used for the last 20 sites I bookmarked, I can see some themes emerging:

I am following up on the ALTC 2008 conference, by bookmarking resources relating to podcasting and a couple of blog posts I published here on podcasting.

So terms like education, student, altc2008, audio and tool are all relevant for these activities, and are the ones that are showing up in blue and green.

But why isn't the term "podcast" showing up as having been used fairly frequently?
Hmm, maybe I need to clean my tags up a bit.

But another useful thing I to reflect on here is the design pattern of offering a space for reflection next to a tag cloud. That's something that we're thinking about for our SkillClouds project, where we are encouraging students to engage with their transferable skills by visualising these skills as a tag cloud.

I like the idea of short reflections that are kept available on the main page, the way that rescope have done this.