Rescope was launched last week and the first users have registered. However, I need more people to participate in this experiment. Therefore I created the following announcement.

This call for participation seeks for users of the social bookmarking platform http://www.delicious.com/ who are interested in participating in the pilot study of ReScope (http://lnx-otecexp-005v.ou.nl/rescope/). This study analyzes how reflection on tagging and bookmarking can be stimulated with a personal tag cloud visualisation.

Background

Reflection is a crucial factor for learning. This is particularly true outside the traditional educational sectors in settings, in which core professional competences are developed. This is reflected by the TENCompetence project in one of its core usage profile "reflect on competences". The ReScope research pilot is directly related to this usage profile.

Within the scope of social bookmarking and blogging, tags can be considered as traces of evidence for a learner's developing competences. Tag clouds are special visualisations of conceptual information that may help learners to become more aware of and reflect on their learning trajectories in relation to the social software they use. The results of this study provide input the activities related to the visualisation of lerner models within the GRAPPLE project.

Objective

The ReScope study addresses the need to stimulate reflective activities and uses a visualisation approach to help learners to identify concepts, processes, and connections that are critical to their learning.

The study analyses the potential of a personal tag cloud visualisation for stimulating reflection about tagging and bookmarking habits on the social bookmarking platform delicious.com. The ReScope system provides a tool to users to stimulate reflection about their tagging activities by utilising novel approaches such as tag clouds and micro blogging. Tagging is one of the key activities in web2.0 related social software. From the perspective of knowledge management and learning, research developed little knowledge about the individuals' benefit from their own tagging activities.

How to support

Interested people are kindly requested to register with ReScope and use the system for at least 8 weeks. ReScope can be found at the following URL.

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

Thank you for your support.

Acknowledgements

ReScope is developed by Christian Glahn at the Open University of the Netherlands.

The project is (partly) sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning; Contract 027087 (http://www.tencompetence.org); and has been (partly) performed within the framework of the IST project IST-2007-215434 GRAPPLE which is partly funded by the European Union.