Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Multilingual tags and the language of LO

I've looked into tagging in different languages before. An interesting thing came out of our little pilot: teachers, non of whom mother tongue was English, still had about 20-30% of tags in English. We had two different thoughts on this,
  • either tag is in English because teacher wanted to share these tags with other teachers, or
  • tag was in English because it is related to the language of the learning resources that was bookmarked
I was now interested in the second possibility, and took a look at a sample of 136 bookmarks with tags in multiple languages related to them.
  • The LOs were in English, Hungarian, Polish and Estonian.
  • The users (43) were Hungarian, Polish, Estonian and Lithuanian
Fair enough, all the English tags were related to the English resources! In close to 30% bookmarks (39 out of 136) this was the case (which also means that 30% of LOs were in English).

Moreover, it seems that for about 1/3 of the times the language of the LO was the same as that of the tag, whereas 2/3 of the cases it varies according to the language of the user. In about 3% of bookmarks one was able to observe multi-lingual tags.

No comments: