Analysis of user behavior on multilingual tagging of learning resources

Although social, collaborative classification through tagging has been the focus of recent research, the effect of multilingual tags is often overlooked. This work presents an early exploratory study of the production and consumption of multilingual tags in a European educational K-12 context. The data, produced by teachers bookmarking and tagging learning resources during three month period, was analysed. Thereafter, a focus group of teachers evaluated a sample of learning resources with metadata records containing both thesaurus terms and multilingual tags. The results of this early study suggest that some tags are found as useful as thesaurus terms and that users are divided about the benefits of multilingual tags. As some tags are useful for some users, "hiding all but the right tags" becomes crucial for the success of a multilingual collaborative tagging system.