How to tag online discussion postings

Tagging for online discussion postings refer to use keywords/tags to summarize your discussion postings in "Subject" field of the postings with keyarods or tags. The keywords/tags functions as key summary to your postings.

§ How to do it?

§ Reply the message that you intend to reply> Erase the default texts in the "Subject" field with the keywords/tags that you intend to use.

§ What keywords/tags should I apply?

§ Think about keywords/tags are more like a title for your posting and they should summarize your postings so people can read your keywords/tags to obtian an overall understanding on your postings.

§ Do you I need to repeat the keywords/tags used in the message that I am replying?

§ It is up to you. It the keywords/tags used in the posting that you are applying are the main keywords/tags, you can repeat them. If not necessary, you can replace them with your keywords/tags.

Why do we need to tag our discussion postings?

Social tagging allows users to organize and re-organize the entire discussion message to their desired, personal formats. Some ONLE tools have an added a “social tagging” feature to enrich missing context. Schellens et al. (2009) concluded that tagging would increase the critical thinking engagements of learners. Additionally, tagging on postings engages us in evaluative summary activities. Tagging process provides learners an additional learning process because learners need to summarize their posting which requires higher thinking skills. Providing keywords, in fact, is fairly challenging process because it requires learners to have good understandings on their postings. This process engages learners in deeper critical thinking process. To the class, tagging for discussion postings make the online discussions more meaningful; otherwise, subject fields frequently are meaningless to online discussions. Tagging for online discussion postings affords an effective Information Visualization (InfoViz) to support learners to recognize unanticipated associations among data and discover new explanations. For example, if we do not tag for discussion postings, a threaded discussion would be meaningless without reading the actual each individual posting (see Figure 1). With effective tagging for discussion postings, the visual of discussion board provides a clear overview of the discussion posting (see Figure 2). Additionally, keywords/tags can be converted into word/tag clouds (see Figure 3 & 4) to provide more visual appealing effect to support problem-solving, knowledge acquisition, decision making, reduce cognitive load, sense making, and to support knowledge co-construction.