Can Social Information Retrieval Enhance the Discovery and Reuse of Digital Educational Content?

This paper gives an extended abstract of the dissertation work seeking to find how social information retrieval can enhance the discovery and reuse of digital educational content. A social bookmarking and tagging tool, that is used in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural context of Europe, is introduced to teachers. We intend to use this information to create social information retrieval mechanisms that allow flexible access to large-scale collections of digital educational content. A first step towards studying the design and implementation of such systems is to understand more about tagging in multiple languages, its underlying data structures, and how multi-lingual tags and annotations can be leveraged for social information retrieval, such as for a recommender and a social navigation system. Thereafter, we plan to study their acceptance, use and usefulness. Moreover, our goal is to make the discovery of digital educational content more useful and efficient for teachers by studying the relationship between different information seeking tasks and retrieval methods. We believe that this can facilitate, support and enhance the everyday tasks of teachers and learners when interacting with digital content for education