Conference Paper

Take up My Tags: Exploring Benefits of Meaning Making in a Collaborative Learning Task at the Workplace

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Abstract

In the digital realm, meaning making is reflected in the reciprocal manipulation of mediating artefacts. We understand uptake, i.e. interaction with and understanding of others’ artefact interpretations, as central mechanism and investigate its impact on individual and social learning at work. Results of our social tagging field study indicate that increased uptake of others’ tags is related to a higher shared understanding of collaborators as well as narrower and more elaborative exploration in individual information search. We attribute the social and individual impact to accommodative processes in the high uptake condition.

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... In line with the MATURE project, a focus was put on tags that could describe the learning and working domain and be used for discovering helpful materials. Tags were also seen as a way to negotiate the meaning of particular experiences and established shared understanding in a group of learners (Dennerlein, Seitlinger, Lex, & Ley, 2016). Several services made use of the tags produced, eg, recommender services for resources (Seitlinger et al., 2015) or tag recommenders that were intended to drive the consistency of how objects were described (Seitlinger et al., 2018). ...
... While the infrastructure is mainly motivated by knowledge creation theory (and hence stands more on the emergence side of our continuum), it is still capable of dealing with ontologies or other more stable conceptualizations. An example of the use of both tags and pre-established categories can be found in Dennerlein et al. (2016) where the SSS supported more exploratory and collaborative learning activity. ...
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